
Class. 
Book. 



M24A5 









LECTURES 

ON 

ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING 

DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH 
IN NOVEMBER 1853 

BY 

JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D. 

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW 
OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION r!Y CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

BRANTWOOD EDITION \», 



CHARLES E. MERRILL & CO., NEW YORK 
GEORGE ALLEN, LONDON AND ORPINGTON 

1892 






v<b 



SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT 



Mr. George Allen begs to announce that Ruskiris Works 
will hereafter be published in America by Messrs. Charles 
E. Merrill & Co., of New York, who will issue the only 
authorised editions. 






Copyright 1892 
Charles E. Merrill & Co. 



INTRODUCTION. 

THE reader who to-day, for the first time, 
becomes acquainted with these lectures, can 
hardly fail to note that a considerable part 
of their teaching is now familiar and accepted 
doctrine. Much which seemed novel forty 
years ago seems now almost hackneyed. 
Much which then excited eager and embit- 
tered opposition would in these days find 
few to contradict it. But, on the other hand, 
so rapid has been the change of sentiment 
and opinion in regard to some of the topics 
touched upon in these pages, that there are 
passages which have already acquired an 
antiquated character, while much that is 
confidently asserted and strenuously urged 
may now seem to rest upon erroneous prem- 
ises. The opinions of the author himself 
upon many topics have undergone large 
modification, the result of wider knowledge 
and deeper reflection, and he himself has, in 



IV INTRODUCTION. 

later works, made clear this change in his 
judgments and conclusions. 

Indeed one of the chief points of interest 
in these lectures is the illustration which 
they afford, when read in comparison with 
his later writings, of the workings and devel- 
opment of Mr. Ruskin's mind. Thus read, 
they serve to indicate to the intelligent stu- 
dent the nature of Mr. Ruskin's authority as 
a teacher, and the influence which his works 
should exert in the formation of opinions, 
and in the direction of sentiment. 

Scarcely one among the English masters of 
thought teaches more forcibly the lesson of 
intellectual integrity, and, if his work be 
taken as a whole, of mental independence. 
But one of the most characteristic traits of 
Mr. Ruskin's genius has been, from the be- 
ginning, the intensity and concentration of 
his gaze for the time being upon one side of 
the shield of truth. To-day he is the knight 
of the golden side, to-morrow of the silver. 
His to-day's self is often as ready in the ser- 
vice of truth to unhorse his yesterday's self, 
as if he were his own most eager rival for the 
favours of his mistress. In respect to many 



INTRODUCTION. V 

subjects it were as difficult to make a con- 
sistent body of doctrine in matters of detail 
from his various deliverances of early and 
late years, as to reconcile the teachings of the 
Fathers of the Church ; but, as in their works, 
so in his, there is a general concordance of 
fundamental principles and a consistency of 
essential spirit. In all his writings a single 
spirit of generous ardour for the truth pre- 
vails, though not infrequently hampered by 
limitation of vision, by impetuosity of zeal, 
by rashness, wilfulness and exaggerated self- 
confidence. To-day he rides with Sir Gala- 
had, pure, inspired, steadfast as he ; to-mor- 
row with Don Quixote, generous, deluded, 
extravagant as he. 

A vivid illustration of Mr. Ruskin's fixing 
his attention on a half truth as if it were the 
entire truth, occurs in the interesting lecture 
on Turner in this volume, where, speaking 
of the lack of love for nature in the sev- 
enteenth and eighteenth centuries, he says, 
that in the literature of these centuries, " you 
will find that nearly all its expressions having 
reference to the country show . . . either 
a foolish sentimentality or a morbid fear, 



VI INTRODUCTION. 

both of course coupled with the most curi- 
ous ignorance. You will find all its descrip- 
tive expressions at once vague and monoto- 
nous. Brooks are always ' purling ; ' birds 
always ' warbling ; ' mountains always ' lift 
their horrid peaks above the clouds ; ' vales 
always are ' lost in the shadow of the gloomy 
woods ; ' a few more distinct ideas about 
haymaking and curds and cream, acquired 
in the neighborhood of Richmond Bridge, 
serving to give an occasional appearance of 
freshness to the catalogue of the sublime 
and beautiful which descended from poet to 
poet ; while a few true pieces of pastoral 
like the ' Vicar of Wakefield [ and Walton's 
i Angler/ relieved the general waste of dul- 
ness " (p. 1 59). " And although in the second- 
rate writers continually, and in the first-rate 
ones occasionally, you find an affectation of 
interest in mountains, clouds and forests, 
yet whenever they write from their heart, 
you will find an utter absence of feeling 
respecting anything beyond gardens and 
grass " (p. 160). 

This is not intended merely for humourous 
exaggeration ; it is part of a serious argu- 



INTRODUCTION. Vll 

ment ; for the moment the proposition is be- 
lieved. But the next moment no one would 
have more clearly seen, or more forcibly pre- 
sented the other side of the truth than Mr. 
Ruskin himself. It would have been easy 
for him to celebrate that incomparable series 
of lyrics of nature which the seventeenth cen- 
tury, from Shakespeare to Herrick, has left 
to us, lyrics which, to borrow a phrase of Sid- 
ney's, " make the too much loved earth more 
lovely." He would hardly have pardoned 
any one else for intimating that all Milton's 
descriptive expressions of nature are at once 
" vague and monotonous.'' And L Allegro 
and // Penseroso, Lycidas and Comus are 
not fuller of the poetry of nature, than 
some of Henry Vaughan's exquisite verse, 
which in its sympathy with the natural 
world, not Wordsworth, not Tennyson has 
surpassed. No doubt too many brooks 
run * purling ' down these centuries, and 
too many birds are 'warbling' on their 
banks, but there are many brooks even in 
the most artificial period which do not purl, 
and birds which do not warble. There 
is such a bird even in one of Shadwell's 



Vlll INTRODUCTION. 

stanzas, — " Shadwell who never deviates into 
sense," — 

" A little charming and harmonious fowl, 
Which sings its lump of body to a soul." 

Mr. Ruskin is, of course, right in his general 
thesis that the love of the sublimer aspects 
of nature, the delight in what is majestic and 
beautiful in her wilder forms, and the sense 
of the intimacy of relation between nature 
and the mind of man, are, in their full devel- 
opment, sentiments and conceptions of com- 
paratively recent growth. Wordsworth and 
Turner are of the nineteenth century. 

This tendency of Mr. Ruskin's genius to 
confine its vision, for the moment, to a single 
aspect of a complex and many-sided truth, is 
to be borne in mind by the reader of his 
works. In reading them he must keep his 
critical faculty alert, and must exercise that 
independence of judgment of which Mr. Rus- 
kin himself may afford the example. But 
when compelled to question an assertion, or 
to doubt a conclusion, he will find himself 
quickened and stimulated to good purpose ; 
and he will differ only with modesty, and for 
good reason, from a master of such power, 



INTRODUCTION. IX 

whose spirit and intention, even in the vaga- 
ries of his intelligence, are no less deserving 
of respect, than his genius of admiration. 

The influence which Mr. Ruskin has ex- 
erted over his contemporaries, even when 
his direct teachings have not been accepted 
by them, or have been followed only in part, 
is perhaps nowhere more clearly visible than 
in the change which the prevalent concep- 
tions of architecture as a fine art in its re- 
lation to life have undergone, and in the 
corresponding change in the discipline and 
practice of professional architects. Many 
causes have combined during the past half 
century to revive the sense of the dignity 
and interest of the art of architecture, and 
among these causes perhaps no other has 
been more effective than the teachings of 

Mr. Ruskin. 

C. E. N. 
Ashfield, Mass., August, 1892. 



PREFACE. 

THE following Lectures are printed, as 
far as possible, just as they were delivered. 
Here and there a sentence which seemed 
obscure has been mended, and the passages 
which had not been previously written, have 
been, of course imperfectly, supplied from 
memory. But I am well assured that noth- 
ing of any substantial importance which was 
said in the lecture-room, is either omitted, 
or altered in its signification ; with the ex- 
ception only of a few sentences struck out 
from the notice of the works of Turner, in 
consequence of the impossibility of engrav- 
ing the drawings by which they were illus- 
trated, except at a cost which would have 
too much raised the price of the volume. 
Some elucidatory remarks have, however, 
been added at the close of the second and 
fourth Lectures, which I hope may be of 
more use than the passages which I was 
obliged to omit. 



Xll PREFACE. 

The drawings by which the Lectures on 
Architecture were illustrated have been care- 
fully reduced, and well transferred to wood 
by Mr. Thurston Thompson. Those which 
were given in the course of the notices of 
schools of painting could not be so trans- 
ferred, having been drawn in colour ; and I 
have therefore merely had a few lines, abso- 
lutely necessary to make the text intelligi- 
ble, copied from engravings. 

I forgot, in preparing the second Lecture 
for the press, to quote a passage from Lord 
Lindsay's " Christian Art/' illustrative of 
what is said in that lecture (§ 52), respecting 
the energy of the mediaeval republics. This 
passage, describing the circumstances under 
which the Campanile of the Duomo of Flor- 
ence was built, is interesting also as noticing 
the universality of talent which was required 
of architects ; and which, as I have asserted 
in the Addenda (§ 60), always ought to be 
required of them. I do not, however, now 
regret the omission, as I cannot easily imag- 
ine a better preface to an essay on civil 
architecture than this simple statement. 

" In 1332, Giotto was chosen to erect it 



PREFACE. Xlll 

(the Campanile), on the ground, avowedly, 
of the universality of his talents, with the 
appointment of Capo Maestro, or chief archi- 
tect (chief master I should rather write), of 
the Cathedral and its dependencies, a yearly 
salary of one hundred gold florins, and the 
privilege of citizenship, under the special 
understanding that he was not to quit Flor- 
ence. His designs being approved of, the 
republic passed a decree in the spring of 
1334, that the Campanile should be built so 
as to exceed in magnificence, height, and 
excellence of workmanship whatever in that 
time had been achieved by the Greeks and 
Romans in the time of their utmost power 
and greatness. The first stone was laid, 
accordingly, with great pomp, on the 1 8th 
of July following, and the work prosecuted 
with vigour, and with such costliness and 
utter disregard of expense, that a citizen of 
Verona, looking on, exclaimed that the re- 
public was taxing her strength too far, that 
the united resources of two great monarchs 
would be insufficient to complete it ; a criti- 
cism which the Signoria resented by confin- 
ing him for two months in prison, and after- 



XIV PREFACE. 

wards conducting him through the public 
treasury, to teach him that the Florentines 
could build their whole city of marble, and 
not one poor steeple only, were they so in- 
clined." 

I see that "The Builder," vol. xi., page 
690, has been endeavouring to inspire the cit- 
izens of Leeds with some pride of this kind 
respecting their town-hall. The pride would 
be well, but I sincerely trust that the tower 
in question may not be built on the design 
there proposed. I am sorry to have to write 
a special criticism, but it must be remem- 
bered that the best works, by the best men 
living, are in this age abused without mercy 
by nameless critics; and it would be unjust 
to the public, if those who have given their 
names as guarantee for their sincerity never 
had the courage to enter a protest against 
the execution of designs which appear to 
them unworthy. 

Denmark Hill, i&h April, 1854. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Preface iii 



LECTURE I. 
Architecture i 

LECTURE II. 

Architecture 61 

Addenda to Lectures I. and II. B . . 102 

LECTURE III. 
Turner and his Works . . .• - . .136 

LECTURE IV. 

Pre-Raphaelitism 182 

Addenda to Lecture IV. . 224 



INDEX 



233 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PLATE PAGE 

" I. Figs. i. 3. and 5. Illustrative diagrams 6 

II. „ 2. Window in Oakham Castle . 9 

- III. ,, 4, and 6. Spray of ash-tree, and 

improvement of the same on 

Greek principles ... 18 

IV. ,, 7. Window in Dunblane Cathedral 29 

V. ,, 8. Mediaeval turret • • • 37 

VI. ,, 9. AND 10. LOMBARDIC TOWERS . 42 

VII. ,, 11. and 12. Spires at Coutances 

and Rouen 45 

VIII. ,, 13. and 14. Illustrative diagrams 71 

IX. „ 15. Sculpture at Lyons ... 72 

X. ,, 16. Niche at Amiens .... 75 
XI. ,, 17. and 18. Tiger's head, and im- 
provement of the same on 
Greek principles . {Frontispiece) 
XII. „ 19. Garret window in Hotel de 

BOURGTHEROUDE .... 93 

XIII. ,, 20. and 21. Trees, as drawn in the 

THIRTEENTH CENTURY . . . 148 

XIV. „ 22. Rocks, as drawn by the school 

of Leonardo da Vinci . .152 

XV. ,, 23. Boughs of trees, after Titian 153 



LECTURES 



ON 



ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 



LECTURE I. 

ARCHITECTURE. 

Delivered November i, 1853. 

1. I THINK myself peculiarly happy in being 
permitted to address the citizens of Edinburgh 
on the subject of architecture, for it is one 
which, they cannot but feel, interests them 
nearly. Of all the cities in the British Islands, 
Edinburgh is the one which presents most 
advantages for the display of a noble building ; 
and which, on the other hand, sustains most 
injury in the erection of a commonplace or 
unworthy one. You are all proud of your 
city ; surely you must feel it a duty in some 



2 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

sort to justify your pride; that is to say, to 
give yourselves a right to be proud of it. 
That you were born under the shadow of its 
two fantastic mountains, — that you live where 
from your room windows you can trace the 
shores of its glittering Firth, are no rightful 
subjects of pride. You did not raise the 
mountains, nor shape the shores; and the 
historical houses of your Canongate, and the 
broad battlements of your castle, reflect honour 
upon you only through your ancestors. Before 
you boast of your city, before even you venture 
to call it yours, ought you not scrupulously to 
weigh the exact share you have had in adding 
to it or adorning it, to calculate seriously the 
influence upon its aspect which the work of 
your own hands has exercised ? I do not 
say that, even when you regard your city in 
this scrupulous and testing spirit, you have not 
considerable ground for exultation. As far as 
I am acquainted with modern architecture, I 
am aware of no streets which, in simplicity 
and manliness of style, or general breadth and 
brightness of effect, equal those of the New 
Town of Edinburgh. But yet I am well per- 
suaded that as you traverse those streets, your 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 3 

feelings of pleasure and pride in them are 
much complicated with those which are excited 
entirely by the surrounding scenery. As you 
walk up or down George Street, for instance, 
do you not look eagerly for every opening to 
the north and south, which lets in the lustre 
of the Firth of Forth, or the rugged outline of 
the Castle Rock ? Take away the sea- waves, 
and the dark basalt, and I fear you would 
find little to interest you in George Street by 
itself. Now I remember a city, more nobly 
placed even than your Edinburgh, which, in- 
stead of the valley that you have now filled 
by lines of railroad, has a broad and rushing 
river of blue water sweeping through the 
heart of it ; which, for the dark and solitary 
rock that bears your castle, has an amphi- 
theatre of cliffs crested with cypresses and 
olive; which, for the two masses of Arthur's 
Seat and the ranges of the Pentlands, has 
a chain of blue mountains higher than the 
haughtiest peaks of your Highlands; and 
which, for your far-away Ben Ledi and Ben 
More, has the great central chain of the St. 
Gothard Alps : and yet, as you go out of the 
gates, and walk in the suburban streets of that 



4 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

city — I mean Verona — the eye never seeks 
to rest on that external scenery, however 
gorgeous; it does not look for the gaps be- 
tween the houses, as you do here; it may 
for a few moments follow the broken line of 
the great Alpine battlements; but it is only 
where they form a background for other battle- 
ments, built by the hand of man. There is no 
necessity felt to dwell on the blue river or 
the burning hills. The heart and eye have 
enough to do in the streets of the city itself; 
they are contented there ; nay, they sometimes 
turn from the natural scenery, as if too savage 
and solitary, to dwell with a deeper interest 
on the palace walls that cast their shade upon 
the streets, and the crowd of towers that rise 
out of that shadow into the depth of the sky. 

2. That is a city to be proud of, indeed; 
and it is this kind of architectural dignity 
which you should aim at, in what you add to 
Edinburgh or rebuild in it. For remember, 
you must either help your scenery or destroy 
it ; whatever you do has an effect of one kind 
or the other; it is never indifferent. But, 
above all, remember that it is chiefly by 
private, not by public, effort that your city 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 5 

must be adorned. It does not matter how 
many beautiful public buildings you possess, 
if they are not supported by, and in harmony 
with, the private houses of the town. Neither 
the mind nor the eye will accept a new college, 
or a new hospital, or a new institution, for a 
city. It is the Canongate, and the Princes 
Street, and the High Street that are Edin- 
burgh. It is in your own private houses that 
the real majesty of Edinburgh must consist; 
and, what is more, it must be by your own 
personal interest that the style of the archi- 
tecture which rises around you must be prin- 
cipally guided. Do not think that you can 
have good architecture merely by paying for 
it. It is not by subscribing liberally for a 
large building once in forty years that you 
can call up architects and inspiration. It is 
only by active and sympathetic attention to 
the domestic and every-day work which is 
done for each of you, that you can educate 
either yourselves to the feeling, or your builders 
to the doing, of what is truly great. 

3. Well, but, you will answer, you cannot 
feel interested in architecture : you do not care 
about it, and cannot care about it. I know 



O ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

you cannot. About such architecture as is 
built nowadays, no mortal ever did or could 
care. You do not feel interested in hearing 
the same thing over and over again ; — why do 
you suppose you can feel interested in seeing 
the same thing over and over again, were that 
thing even the best and most beautiful in the 
world ? Now, you all know the kind of 
window which you usually build in Edinburgh : 
here is an example of the head of one {fig. i), 
a massy lintel of a single stone, laid across 
from side to side, with bold square-cut jambs 
— in fact, the simplest form it is possible to 
build. It is by no means a bad form ; on the 
contrary, it is very manly and vigorous, and 
has a certain dignity in its utter refusal of 
ornament. But I cannot say it is entertaining. 
How many windows precisely of this form do 
you suppose there are in the New Town of 
Edinburgh ? I have not counted them all 
through the town, but I counted them this 
morning along this very Queen Street, in 
which your Hall is; and on the one side of 
that street, there are of these windows, abso- 
lutely similar to this example, and altogether 
devoid of any relief by decoration, six hundred 



Plate I. 




1 

1 




— — 


/ 


1 1 

1 


1 


ri- 



Fig. i. 



jpiirn^ 



Fig. 3- 



Fig. 5- 



I. ARCHITECTURE. J 

and seventy-eight.* And your decorations are 
just as monotonous as your simplicities. How 
many Corinthian and Doric columns do you 
think there are in your banks, and post-offices, 
institutions, and I know not what else, one 
exactly like another ? — and yet you expect to 
be interested ! Nay, but, you will answer me 
again, we see sunrises and sunsets, and violets 
and roses, over and over again, and we do not 
tire of them. What ! did you ever see one 
sunrise like another ? does not God varj r His 
clouds for you every morning and every night? 
though, indeed, there is enough in the dis- 
appearing and appearing of the great orb 
above the rolling of the world, to interest all 
of us, one would think, for as many times as 
we shall see it ; and yet the aspect of it is 
changed for us daily. You see violets and 
roses often, and are not tired of them. True ! 
but you did not often see two roses alike, or, 
if you did, you took care not to put them 
beside each other in the same nosegay, for 
fear your nosegay should be uninteresting; 
and yet you think you can put 150,000 square 

* Including York Place, and Picardy Place, but not count- 
ing any window which has mouldings. 



8 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

windows side by side in the same streets, and 
still be interested by them. Why, if I were to 
say the same thing over and over again, for 
the single hour you are going to let me talk 
to you, would you listen to me ? and yet you 
let your architects do the same thing over and 
over again for three centuries, and expect to be 
interested by their architecture ; with a farther 
disadvantage on the side of the builder, as 
compared with the speaker, that my wasted 
words would cost you but little, but his 
wasted stones have cost you no small part of 
your incomes. 

4. " Well, but," you still think within your- 
selves, " it is not right that architecture should 
be interesting. It is a very grand thing, this 
architecture, but essentially unentertaining. 
It is its duty to be dull, it is monotonous by 
law : it cannot be correct and yet amusing." 

Believe me, it is not so. All things that are 
worth doing in art, are interesting and attrac- 
tive when they are done. There is no law of 
right which consecrates dulness. The proof 
of a thing's being right is, that it has power 
over the heart ; that it excites us, wins us, or 
helps us. I do not say that it has influence 



Plate II. 




Fig. 2. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 9 

over all, but it has over a large class, one kind 
of art being fit for one class, and another 
for another ; and there is no goodness in art 
which is independent of the power of pleasing. 
Yet, do not mistake me; I do not mean that 
there is no such thing as neglect of the best 
art, or delight in the worst, just as many men 
neglect nature, and feed upon what is artificial 
and base; but I mean, that all good art has 
the capacity of pleasing, if people will attend 
to it ; that there is no law against its pleasing ; 
but, on the contrary, something wrong either 
in the spectator or the art, when it ceases to 
please. Now, therefore, if you feel that your 
present school of architecture is unattractive 
to you, I say there is something wrong, 
either in the architecture or in you ; and I 
trust you will not think I mean to flatter you 
when I tell you, that the wrong is not in you, 
but in the architecture. Look at this for a 
moment (fig. 2) ; it is a window actually 
existing— a window of an English domestic 
building* — a window built six hundred years 

* Oakham Castle. I have enlarged this illustration from 
Mr. Hudson Turner's admirable work on the domestic archi- 
tecture of England. 



IO ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

ago. You will not tell me you have no plea- 
sure in looking at this ; or that you could not, 
by any possibility, become interested in the art 
which produced it; or that, if every window 
in your streets were of some such form, with 
perpetual change in their ornaments, you would 
pass up and down the street with as much in- 
difference as now, when your windows are of 
this form (fig. i). Can you for an instant 
suppose that the architect was a greater or 
wiser man who built this, than he who built 
that ? or that in the arrangement of these dull 
and monotonous stones there is more wit and 
sense than you can penetrate ? Believe me, 
the wrong is not in you ; you would all like 
the best things best, if you only saw them. 
What is wrong in you is your temper, not 
your taste ; your patient and trustful temper, 
which lives in houses whose architecture it 
takes for granted, and subscribes to public 
edifices from which it derives no enjoyment. 

5. "Well, but what are we to do?" you 
will say to me ; " we cannot make architects 
of ourselves." Pardon me, you can — and you 
ought. Architecture is an art for all men to 
learn, because all are concerned with it ; and 



I. ARCHITECTURE. I I 

it is so simple, that there is no excuse for not 
being acquainted with its primary rules, any 
more than for ignorance of grammar or of 
spelling, which are both of them far more 
difficult sciences. Far less trouble than is 
necessary to learn how to play chess, or whist, 
or golf, tolerably, — far less than a schoolboy 
takes to win the meanest prize of the passing 
year, would acquaint you with all the main prin- 
ciples of the construction of a Gothic cathedral, 
and I believe you would hardly find the study 
less amusing. But be that as it may, there 
are one or two broad principles which need 
only be stated to be understood and accepted ; 
and those I mean to lay before you, with your 
permission, before you leave this room. 

6. You must all, of course, have observed 
that the principal distinctions between exist- 
ing styles of architecture depend on their 
methods of roofing any space, as a window 
or door for instance, or a space between 
pillars; that is to say, that the character of 
Greek architecture, and of all that is derived 
from it, depends on its roofing a space with 
a single stone laid from side to side; the 
character of Roman architecture, and of all 



12 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

derived from it, depends on its roofing spaces 
with round arches; and the character of 
Gothic architecture depends on its roofing 
spaces with pointed arches, or gables. I 
need not, of course, in any way follow out 
for you the mode in which the Greek system 
of architecture is derived from the horizontal 
lintel; but I ought perhaps to explain, that 
by Roman architecture I do not mean that 
spurious condition of temple form which was 
nothing more than a luscious imitation of the 
Greek ; but I mean that architecture in which 
the Roman spirit truly manifested itself, the 
magnificent vaultings of the aqueduct and the 
bath, and the colossal heaping of the rough 
stones in the arches of the amphitheatre ; an 
architecture full of expression of gigantic 
power and strength of will, and from which 
are directly derived all our most impressive 
early buildings, called, as you know, by various 
antiquaries, Saxon, Norman, or Romanesque. 
Now the first point I wish to insist upon is, 
that the Greek system, considered merely as 
a piece of construction, is weak and barbarous 
compared with the two others. For instance, 
in the case of a large window or door, such 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 1 3 

as fig. I, if you have at your disposal a single 
large and long stone you may indeed roof it 
in the Greek manner, as you~ have done here, 
with comparative security ; but it is always 
expensive to obtain and to raise to their place 
stones of this large size, and in many places 
nearly impossible to obtain them at all : and 
if you have not such stones, and still insist 
upon roofing the space in the Greek way, that 
is to say, upon having a square window, you 
must do it by the miserably feeble adjustment 
of bricks, fig. 3.* You are well aware, of 
course, that this latter is the usual way in 
which such windows are now built in Eng- 
land; you are fortunate enough here in the 
north to be able to obtain single stones, and 
this circumstance alone gives a considerable 
degree of grandeur to your buildings. But 
in all cases, and however built, you cannot 
but see in a moment that this cross bar is 
weak and imperfect. It may be strong enough 
for all immediate intents and purposes, but it 
is not so strong as it might be : however well 
the house is built, it will still not stand so long 
as if it had been better constructed ; and there 
* Plate I. On this subject, see "The Builder/ ' vol. xi. p. 709. 



14 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

is hardly a day passes but you may see some 
rent or flaw in bad buildings of this kind. You 
may see one whenever you choose, in one of 
your most costly, and most ugly buildings, the 
great church with the dome, at the end of 
George Street. I think I never saw a build- 
ing with a principal entrance so utterly ghastly 
and oppressive; and it is as weak as it is 
ghastly. The huge horizontal lintel above 
the door is already split right through. But 
you are not aware of a thousandth part of the 
evil : the pieces of building that you see are 
all carefully done ; it is in the parts that are to 
be concealed by paint and plaster that the bad 
building of the day is thoroughly committed. 
The main mischief lies in the strange devices 
that are used to support the long horizontal 
cross beams of our larger apartments and 
shops, and the framework of unseen walls; 
girders and ties of cast iron, and props and 
wedges, and laths nailed and bolted together, 
on marvellously scientific principles ; so scien- 
tific, that every now and then, when some 
tender reparation is undertaken by the uncon- 
scious householder, the whole house crashes 
into a heap of ruin, so total, that the jury 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 1 5 

which sits on the bodies of the inhabitants 
cannot tell what has been the matter with it, 
and returns a dim verdict of accidental death. 

7. Did you read the account of the pro- 
ceedings at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham 
the other day ? Some dozen of men crushed 
up among the splinters of the scaffolding in an 
instant, nobody knew why. All the engineers 
declare the scaffolding to have been erected 
on the best principles, — that the fall of it is 
as much a mystery as if it had fallen from 
heaven, and were all meteoric stones. The 
jury go to Sydenham and look at the heap 
of shattered bolts and girders, and come back 
as wise as they went. Accidental death! 
Yes, verily; the lives of all those dozen of 
men had been hanging for months at the 
mercy of a flaw in an inch or two of cast iron. 
Very accidental indeed ! Not the less pitiable. 
I grant it not to be an easy thing to raise 
scaffolding to the height of the Crystal Palace 
without incurring some danger, but that is no 
reason why your houses should all be nothing 
but scaffolding. The common system of sup- 
port of walls over shops is now nothing but 
permanent scaffolding; part of iron, part of 



1 6 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

wood, part of brick ; in its skeleton state awful 
to behold ; the weight of three or four stories 
of wall resting sometimes on two or three 
pillars of the size of gas pipes, sometimes on 
a single cross beam of wood, laid across from 
party wall to party wall in the Greek manner. 
I have a vivid recollection at this moment of a 
vast heap of splinters in the Borough Road, 
close to St. George's, Southwark, in the road 
between my own house and London. I had 
passed it the day before, a goodly shop front, 
and sufficient house above, with a few repairs 
undertaken in the shop before opening a new, 
business. The master and mistress had found 
it dusty that afternoon, and went out to tea. 
When they came back in the evening, they 
found their whole house in the form of a 
heap of bricks blocking the roadway, with 
a party of men digging out their cook. But 
I do not insist on casualties like these, dis- 
graceful to us as they are, for it is, of course, 
perfectly possible to build a perfectly secure 
house or a secure window in the Greek manner ; 
but the simple fact is, that in order to obtain 
in the cross lintel the same amount of strength 
which you can obtain in a pointed arch, you 



I. ARCHITECTURE. I J 

must go to an immensely greater cost in stone 
or in labour. Stonehenge is strong enough, 
but it takes some trouble to build in the manner 
of Stonehenge : and Stonehenge itself is not 
so strong as an arch of the Colosseum. You 
could not raise a circle of four Stonehenges, 
one over the other, with safety ; and as it is, 
more of the cross-stones are fallen upon the 
plain of Sarum than arches rent away, except 
by the hand of man, from the mighty circle of 
Rome. But I waste words ; — your own com- 
mon sense must show you in a moment that 
this is a weak form ; and there is not at this 
instant a single street in London where some 
house could not be pointed out with a flaw 
running through its brickwork, and repairs 
rendered necessary in consequence, merely 
owing to the adoption of this bad form; and 
that our builders know so well, that in myriads 
of instances you find them actually throwing 
concealed arches above the horizontal lintels 
to take the weight off them; and the gabled 
decoration, at the top of some Palladian win- 
dows, is merely the ornamental form resulting 
from a bold device of the old Roman builders 
to effect the same purpose. 



1 8 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

8. But there is a farther reason for our 
adopting the pointed arch than its being the 
strongest form ; it is also the most beautiful 
form in which a window or door-head can be 
built. Not the most beautiful because it is 
the strongest ; but most beautiful, because its 
form is one of those which, as we know by 
its frequent occurrence in the work of Nature 
around us, has been appointed by the Deity 
to be an everlasting source of pleasure to the 
human mind. 

Gather a branch from any of the trees or 
flowers to which the earth owes its principal 
beauty. You will find that every one of its 
leaves is terminated, more or less, in the form 
of the pointed arch ; and to that form owes its 
grace and character. I will take, for instance, 
a spray of the tree which so gracefully adorns 
your Scottish glens and crags — there is no 
lovelier in the world — the common ash. Here 
is a sketch of the clusters of leaves which 
form the extremity of one of its young shoots 
{fig. 4); and, by the way, it will furnish us 
with an interesting illustration of another 
error in modern architectural systems. You 
know how fond modern architects, like foolish 



Plate III. 




Fig. 4. 




Fig. 6. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 1 9 

modern politicians, are of their equalities, and 
similarities ; how necessary they think it that 
each part of a building should be like every 
other part. Now Nature abhors equality, and 
similitude, just as much as foolish men love 
them. You will find that the ends of the 
shoots of the ash are composed of four * green 
stalks bearing leaves, springing in the form 
of a cross, if seen from above, as in fig, 5, 
Plate I., and at first you will suppose the four 
arms of the cross are equal. But look more 
closely, and you will find that two opposite 
arms or stalks have only five leaves each, and 
the other two have seven; or else, two have 
seven, and the other two nine ; but always 
one pair of stalks has two leaves more than 
the other pair. Sometimes the tree gets a little 
puzzled, and forgets which is to be the longest 
stalk, and begins with a stem for seven leaves 
where it should have nine, and then recollects 
itself at the last minute, and puts on another 
leaf in a great hurry, and so produces a stalk 
with eight leaves; but all this care it takes 

* Sometimes of six ; that is to say, they spring in pairs ; 
only the two uppermost pairs, sometimes the three upper- 
most, spring so close together as to appear one cluster. 



20 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

merely to keep itself out of equalities ; and all 
its grace and power of pleasing are owing to 
its doing so, together with the lovely curves in 
which its stalks, thus arranged, spring from the 
main bough. Fig. 5 is a plan of their arrange- 
ment merely, but fig. 4 is the way in which 
you are most likely to see them : and observe, 
they spring from the stalk precisely as a Gotliic 
vaulted roof springs , each stalk representing 
a rib of the roof, and the leaves its crossing 
stones ; and the beauty of each of those leaves 
is altogether owing to its terminating in the 
Gothic form, the pointed arch. Now do you 
think you would have liked your ash trees as 
well, if Nature had taught them Greek, and 
shown them how to gro"w according to the 
received Attic architectural rules of right? 
I will try you. Here is a cluster of ash leaves, 
which I have grown expressly for you on 
Greek principles {fig. 6, Plate III.) How do 
you like it ? 

9. Observe, I have played you no trick in 
this comparison. * It is perfectly fair in all 
respects. I have merely substituted for the 
beautiful spring of the Gothic vaulting in the 
ash bough, a cross lintel ; and then, in order 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 21 

to raise the leaves to the same height, I intro- 
duce vertical columns ; and I make the leaves 
square-headed instead of pointed, and their 
lateral ribs at right angles with the central rib, 
instead of sloping from it. I have, indeed, 
only given you two boughs instead of four; 
because the perspective of the crossing ones 
could not have been given without confusing 
the figure ; but I imagine you have quite 
enough of them as it is. 

" Nay, but," some of you instantly answer, 
" if we had been as long accustomed to square- 
leaved ash trees as we have been to sharp- 
leaved ash trees, we should like them just as 
well." Do not think it. Are you not much 
more accustomed to grey whinstone and brown 
sandstone than you are to rubies or emeralds ? 
and yet will you tell me you think them as 
beautiful ? Are you not more accustomed to 
the ordinary voices of men than to the perfect 
accents of sweet singing? yet do you not 
instantly declare the song to be loveliest ? 
Examine well the channels of your admiration, 
and you will find that they are, in verity, as 
unchangeable as the channels of your heart's 
blood; that just as by the pressure of a bandage, 



22 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

or by unwholesome and perpetual action of 
some part of the body, that blood may be 
wasted or arrested, and in its stagnancy cease 
to nourish the frame, or in its disturbed flow 
affect it with incurable disease, so also admira- 
tion itself may, by the bandages of fashion, 
bound close over the eyes and the arteries 
of the soul, be arrested in its natural pulse 
and healthy flow ; but that wherever the arti- 
ficial pressure is removed, it will return into 
that bed which has been traced for it by the 
finger of God. 

10. Consider this subject well, and you will 
find that custom has indeed no real influence 
upon our feelings of the beautiful, except in 
dulling and checking them ; that is to say, 
it will and does, as we advance in years, 
deaden in some degree our enjoyment of all 
beauty, but it in no wise influences our deter- 
mination of what is beautiful, and what is not. 
You see the broad blue sky every day over 
your heads; but you do not for that reason 
determine blue to be less or more beautiful 
than you did at first; you are unaccustomed 
to see stones as blue as the sapphire, but you 
do not for that reason think the sapphire less 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 23 

beautiful than other stones. The blue colour 
is everlastingly appointed by the Deity to be 
a source of delight; and whether seen per- 
petually over your head, or crystallised once 
in a thousand years into a single and incom- 
parable stone, your acknowledgment of its 
beauty is equally natural, simple, and instan- 
taneous. Pardon me for engaging you in a 
metaphysical discussion; for it is necessary 
to the establishment of some of the greatest 
of all architectural principles that I should 
fully convince you of this great truth, and 
that I should quite do away with the various 
objections to it, which I suppose must arise 
in your minds. Of these there is one more 
which I must briefly meet. You know how 
much confusion has been introduced into the 
subject of criticism, by reference to the power 
of Association over the human heart; you 
know how often it has been said that custom 
must have something to do with our ideas of 
beauty, because it endears so many objects 
to the affections. But, once for all, observe 
that the powers of association and of beauty 
are two entirely distinct powers, — as distinct, 
for instance, as the forces of gravitation and 



24 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

electricity. These forces may act together, 
or may neutralise one another, but are not 
for that reason to be supposed the same force ; 
and the charm of association will sometimes 
enhance, and sometimes entirely overpower, 
that of beauty; but you must not confound 
the two together. You love man}'' things 
because you are accustomed to them, and 
are pained by many things because they are 
strange to you; but that does not make the 
accustomed sight more beautiful, or the strange 
one less so. The well-known object may be 
dearer to you, or you may have discovered 
charms in it which others cannot; but the 
charm was there before you discovered it, 
only needing time and love to perceive it. 
You love your friends and relations more 
than all the world beside, and may perceive 
beauties in their faces which others cannot 
perceive; but you feel that you would be 
ridiculous in allowing yourselves to think 
them the most beautiful persons in the world : 
you acknowledge that the real beauty of the 
human countenance depends on fixed laws of 
form and expression, and not on the affection 
you bear to it, or the degree in which you are 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 25 

familiarised with it : and so does the beauty 
of all other existences. 

11. Now, therefore, I think that, without 
the risk of any farther serious objection oc- 
curring to you, I may state what I believe to 
be the truth, — that beauty has been appointed 
by the Deity to be one of the elements by 
which the human soul is continually sus- 
tained; it is therefore to be found more or 
less in all natural objects, but in order that 
we may not satiate ourselves with it, and 
weary of it, it is rarely granted to us in its 
utmost degrees. When we see it in those 
utmost degrees, we are attracted to it strongly, 
and remember it long, as in the case of 
singularly beautiful scenery, or a beautiful 
countenance. On the other hand, absolute 
ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect 
beauty; but degrees of it more or less dis- 
tinct are associated with whatever has the 
nature of death and sin, just as beauty is asso- 
ciated with what has the nature of virtue and 
of life. 

12. This being so, you see that when the 
relative beauty of any particular forms has to 
be examined, we may reason, from the forms 



26 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

of Nature around us, in this manner: — what 
Nature does generally, is sure to be more or 
less beautiful; what she does rarely, will either 
be very beautiful, or absolutely ugly. And we 
may again easily determine, if we are not 
willing in such a case to trust our feelings, 
which of these is indeed the case, by this 
simple rule, that if the rare occurrence is the 
result of the complete fulfilment of a natural 
law, it will be beautiful; if of the violation of 
a natural law, it will be ugly. For instance, 
a sapphire is the result of the complete and 
perfect fulfilment of the laws of aggregation 
in the earth of alumina, and it is therefore 
beautiful; more beautiful than clay, or any 
other of the conditions of that earth. But a 
square leaf on any tree would be ugly, being 
a violation of the laws of growth in trees,* 
and we ought to feel it so. 

13. Now then, I proceed to argue in this 
manner from what we see in the woods and 
fields around us ; that as they are evidently 

* I am at present aware only of one tree, the tulip tree, 
which has an exceptional form, and which, I doubt not, 
every one will admit, loses much beauty in consequence. 
All other leaves, as far as I know, have the round or pointed 
arch in the form of the extremities of their foils. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 2*] 

meant for our delight, and as we always feel 
them to be beautiful, we may assume that the 
forms into which their leaves are cast, are 
indeed types of beauty, not of extreme or 
perfect, but average beauty. And finding that 
they invariably terminate more or less in 
pointed arches, and are not square-headed, I 
assert the pointed arch to be one of the forms 
most fitted for perpetual contemplation by the 
human mind; that it is one of those which 
never weary, however often repeated ; and that 
therefore, being both the strongest in structure, 
and a beautiful form (while the square head is 
both weak in structure, and an ugly form), we 
are unwise ever to build in any other. 

14. Here, however, I must anticipate another 
objection. It may be asked why we are to 
build only the tops of the windows pointed, — 
why not follow the leaves, and point them at 
the bottom also ? 

For this simple reason, that, while in archi- 
tecture you are continually called upon to do 
what may be unnecessary for the sake of beauty, 
you are never called upon to do what is in- 
convenient for the sake of beauty. You want 
the level window sill to lean upon, or to 



28 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

allow the window to open on a balcony : the 
eye and the common sense of the beholder re- 
quire this necessity to be met before any laws 
of beauty are thought of. And beside this, 
there is in the sill no necessity for the pointed 
arch as a bearing form ; on the contrary, it 
would give an idea of weak support for the 
sides of the window, and therefore is at once 
rejected. Only I beg of you particularly to 
observe that the level sill, although useful, and 
therefore admitted, does not therefore become 
beautiful ; the eye does not like it so well as 
the top of the window, nor does the sculptor 
like to attract the eye to it ; his richest mould- 
ings, traceries, and sculptures are all reserved 
for the top of the window ; they are sparingly 
granted to its horizontal base. And farther, 
observe, that when neither the convenience of 
the sill, nor the support of the structure, are 
any more of moment, as in small windows and 
traceries, you instantly have the point given to 
the bottom of the window. Do you recollect 
the west window of your own Dunblane 
Abbey ? If you look in any common guide- 
book, you will find it pointed out as peculiarly 
beautiful, — it is acknowledged to be beautiful 



Plate IV. 



ill -iliMSiit 




Fig. 7. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 29 

by the most careless observer. And why 
beautiful? Look at it {fig. 7). Simply because 
in its great contours it has the form of a forest 
leaf, and because in its decoration it has used 
nothing but forest leaves. The sharp and ex- 
pressive moulding which surrounds it is a very 
interesting example of one used to an enormous 
extent by the builders of the early English 
Gothic, usually in the form seen in fig. 2 
Plate II., composed of clusters of four sharp 
leaves each, originally produced by sculpturing 
the sides of a four-sided pyramid, and after- 
wards brought more or less into a true image 
of leaves, but deriving all its beauty from the 
botanical form. In the present instance only 
two leaves are set in each cluster ; and the 
architect has been determined that the natu- 
ralism should be perfect. For he was no 
common man who designed that cathedral of 
Dunblane. I know not anything so perfect 
in its simplicity, and so beautiful, as far as 
it reaches, in all the Gothic with which I 
am acquainted. And just in proportion to 
his power of mind, that man was content to 
work under Nature's teaching ; and instead 
of putting a merely formal dogtooth, as 



30 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

everybody else did at the time, he went down 
to the woody bank of the sweet river beneath 
the rocks on which he was building, and he 
took up a few of the fallen leaves that lay by 
it, and he set them in his arch, side by side, 
for ever. And, look — that he might show you 
he had done this, — he has made them all of 
different sizes, just as they lay; and that you 
might not by any chance miss noticing the 
variety, he has put a great broad one at the 
top, and then a little one turned the wrong 
way, next to it, so that you must be blind 
indeed if you do not understand his meaning. 
And the healthy change and playfulness of 
this just does in the stone- work what it does 
on the tree boughs, and is a perpetual refresh- 
ment and invigoration ; so that, however long 
you gaze at this simple ornament — and none 
can be simpler, a village mason could carve it 
all round the window in a few hours — you are 
never weary of it, it seems always new. 

15. It is true that oval windows of this form 
are comparatively rare in Gothic work, but, as 
you well know, circular or wheel windows are 
used constantly, and in most traceries the aper- 
tures are curved and pointed as much at the 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 3 1 

bottom as the top. So that I believe you will 
now allow me to proceed upon the assumption, 
that the pointed arch is indeed the best form 
into which the head either of door or window 
can be thrown, considered as a means of sus- 
taining weight above it. How these pointed 
arches ought to be grouped and decorated, I 
shall endeavour to show you in my next lecture. 
Meantime I must beg of you to consider farther 
some of the general points connected with the 
structure of the roof. 

1 6. I am sure that all of you must readily 
acknowledge the charm which i£ imparted to 
any landscape by the presence of cottages; 
and you must over and over again have paused 
at the wicket gate of some cottage garden, 
delighted by the simple beauty of the honey- 
suckle poroh and latticed window. Has it ever 
occurred to you to ask the question, what 
effect the cottage would have upon your feel- 
ings if it had no roof ? no visible roof, I mean ; 
— if instead of the thatched slope, in which the 
little upper windows are buried deep, as in 
a nest of straw — or the rough shelter of its 
mountain shales- — or warm colouring of russet 
tiles — -there were nothing but a flat leaden top 



32 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

to it, making it look like a large packing-case 
with windows in it ? I don't think the rarity 
of such a sight would make you feel it to be 
beautiful ; on the contrary, if you think over 
the matter, you will find that you actually do 
owe, and ought to owe, a great part of your 
pleasure in all cottage scenery, and in all the 
inexhaustible imagery of literature which is 
founded upon it, to the conspicuousness of 
the cottage roof — to the subordination of the 
cottage itself to its covering, which leaves, in 
nine cases out of ten, really more roof than 
anything else. It is, indeed, not so much the 
whitewashed walls — nor the flowery garden — 
nor the rude fragments of stones set for steps 
at the door — nor any other picturesqueness 
of the building which interest you, so much 
as the grey bank of its heavy eaves, deep- 
cushioned with green moss and golden stone- 
crop. And there is a profound, yet evident, 
reason for this feeling. The very soul of the 
cottage — the essence and meaning of it — are 
in its roof; it is that, mainly, wherein consists 
its shelter ; that, wherein it differs most com- 
pletely from a cleft in rocks or bower in woods. 
It is in its thick impenetrable coverlid of close 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 33 

thatch that its whole heart and hospitality 
are concentrated. Consider the difference, in 
sound, of the expressions " beneath my .roof" 
and " within my walls," — consider whether 
you would be best sheltered, in a shed, with 
a stout roof sustained on corner posts, or in 
an enclosure of four walls without a roof at 
all, — and you will quickly see how important 
a part of the cottage the roof must always be 
to the mind as well as to the eye, and how, 
from seeing it, the greatest part of our pleasure 
must continually arise. 

17. Now, do you suppose that which is so 
all-important in a cottage, can be of small 
importance in your own dwelling-house ? Do 
you think that by any splendour of archi- 
tecture — any height of stories— you can atone 
to the mind for the loss of the aspect of the 
roof. It is vain to say you take the roof for 
granted ? You may as well say you take a 
man's kindness for granted, though he neither 
looks nor speaks kindly. You may know him 
to be kind in reality, but you will not like 
him so well as if he spoke and looked kindly 
also. And whatever external splendour you 
may give your houses, you will always feel 



34 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

there is something wanting, unless you see 
their roofs plainly. And this especially in the 
north. In southern architecture the roof is 
of far less importance ; but here the soul of 
domestic building is in the largeness and con- 
spicuousness of the protection against the pon- 
derous snow and driving sleet. You may 
make the fagade of the square pile, if the roof 
be not seen, as handsome as you please, — 
you may cover it with decoration, — but there 
will always be a heartlessness about it, which 
you will not know how to conquer; above all, 
a perpetual difficulty in finishing the wall at 
top, which will require all kinds of strange 
inventions in parapets and pinnacles for its 
decoration, and yet will never look right. 

Now, I need not tell you that, as it is de- 
sirable, for the sake of the effect upon the 
mind, that the roof should be visible, so the 
best and most natural form of roof in the 
north is that which will render it most visible, 
namely, the steep gable : the best and most 
natural, I say, because this form not only 
throws off snow and rain most completely, and 
dries fastest, but obtains the greatest interior 
space within walls of a given height, i emoves 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 35 

the heat of the sun most effectually from the 
upper rooms, and affords most space for 
ventilation. 

1 8. You have then, observe, two great prin- 
ciples, as far as northern architecture is con- 
cerned; first, that the pointed arch is to be 
the means by which the weight of the wall or 
roof is to be sustained; secondly, that the 
steep gable is the form most proper for the 
roof itself. And now observe this most in- 
teresting fact, that all the loveliest Gothic 
architecture in the world is based on the 
group of lines composed of the pointed arch 
and the gable. If you look at the beautiful 
apse of Amiens Cathedral — -a work justly cele- 
brated over all Europe — you will find it formed 
merely of a series of windows surmounted by 
pure gables of open work. If you look at the 
transept porches of Rouen, or at the great and 
celebrated porch of the Cathedral of Rheims, 
or that of Strasbourg, Bayeux, Amiens, or 
Peterborough, still you will see that these 
lovely compositions are nothing more than 
richly decorated forms of gable over pointed 
arch. But more than this, you must be all 
well aware how fond our best architectural 



36 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

artists are of the street effects of foreign 
cities; and even those now present who have 
not personally visited any of the continental 
towns must remember, I should think, some 
of the many interesting drawings by Mr. Prout, 
Mr. Nash, and other excellent draughtsmen, 
which have for many years adorned our ex- 
hibitions. Now, the principal charm of all 
those continental street effects is dependent 
on the houses having high-pitched gable roofs. 
In the Netherlands, and Northern France, 
where the material for building is brick or 
stone, the fronts of the stone gables are raised 
above the roofs, and you have magnificent and 
grotesque ranges of steps or curves decorated 
with various ornaments, succeeding one another 
in endless perspective along the streets of 
Antwerp, Ghent, or Brussels. In Picardy and 
Normandy, again, and many towns of Ger- 
many, where the material for building is princi- 
pally wood, the roof is made to project over 
the gables, fringed with a beautifully carved 
cornice, and casting a broad shadow down 
the house front. This is principally seen at 
Abbeville, Rouen, Lisieux, and others of the 
older towns of France. But, in all cases, 



Plate V. 




Fig. 8. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 37 

the effect of the whole street depends on the 
prominence of the gables ; not only of the 
fronts towards the streets, but of the sides 
also, set with small garret or dormer windows, 
each of the most fantastic and beautiful form, 
and crowned with a little spire or pinnacle. 
Wherever there is a little winding stair, or 
projecting bow window, or any other irregu- 
larity of form, the steep ridges shoot into 
turrets and small spires, as in fig. 8,* each 
in its turn crowned by a fantastic ornament, 
covered with curiously shaped slates or shingles, 
or crested with long fringes of rich ironwork, 
so that, seen from above and from a distance, 
the intricate grouping of the roofs of a French 
city is no less interesting than its actual streets ; 
and in the streets themselves, the masses of 
broad shadow which the roofs form against the 
sky, are a most important background to the 
bright and sculptured surfaces of the walls. 

19. Finally, I need not remind you of the 
effect upon the northern mind which has always 
been produced by the heaven-pointing spire, 
nor of the theory which has been founded 
upon it of the general meaning of Gothic 

* This figure is copied from Prout. 



38 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

architecture as expressive of religious aspira- 
tion. In a few minutes, you may ascertain 
the exact value of that theory, and the degree 
in which it is true. 

The first tower of which we hear as built 
upon the earth, was certainly built in a species 
of aspiration ; but I do not suppose that any 
one here will think it was a religious one. 
" Go to now. Let us build a tower whose 
top may reach unto heaven." From that day 
to this, whenever men have become skilful 
architects at all, there has been a tendency in 
them to build high ; not in any religious feel- 
ing, but in mere exuberance of spirit and 
power- — as they dance or sing — with a certain 
mingling of vanity — like the feeling in which a 
child builds a tower of cards; and, in nobler 
instances, with also a strong sense of, and 
delight in the majesty, height, and strength of 
the building itself, such as we have in that of 
a lofty tree or a peaked mountain. Add to 
this instinct the frequent necessity of points 
of elevation for watch-towers, or of points of 
offence, as in towers built on the ramparts of 
cities, and, finally, the need of elevations for 
the transmission of sound, as in the Turkish 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 39 

minaret and Christian belfry, and you have, I 
think, a sufficient explanation of the tower- 
building of the world in general. Look through 
your Bibles only, and collect the various ex- 
pressions with reference to tower-building 
there, and you will have a very complete idea 
of the spirit in which it is for the most part 
undertaken. You begin with that of Babel; 
then you remember Gideon beating down the 
tower of Penuel, in order more completely to 
humble the pride of the men of the city ; you 
remember the defence of the tower of Shechem 
against Abimelech, and the death of Abimelech 
by the casting of a stone from it by a woman's 
hand; you recollect the husbandman building 
a tower in his vineyard, and the beautiful ex- 
pressions in Solomon's song, — " The tower of 
Lebanon, which looketh towards Damascus ; " 
" I am a wall, and my breasts like towers ; " — 
you recollect the Psalmist's expressions of love 
and delight, "Go ye round about Jerusalem; 
tell the towers thereof: mark ye well her bul- 
warks; consider her palaces, that ye may tell 
it to the generation following." You see in 
all these cases how completely the tower is a 
subject of human pride, or delight, or defence, 



40 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

not in any wise associated with religious senti- 
ment; the towers of Jerusalem being named 
in the same sentence, not with her temple, but 
with her bulwarks and palaces. And thus, 
when the tower is in reality connected with a 
place of worship, it was generally done to add 
to its magnificence, but not to add to its 
religious expression. And over the whole of 
the world, you have various species of elevated 
buildings, the Egyptian pyramid, the Indian 
and Chinese pagoda, the Turkish minaret, and 
the Christian belfry, — all of them raised either 
to make a show from a distance, or to cry 
from, or swing bells in, or hang them round, 
or for some other very human reason. Thus, 
when the good people of Beauvais were build- 
ing their cathedral, that of Amiens, then just 
completed, had excited the admiration of all 
France; and the people of Beauvais, in their 
jealousy and determination to beat the people 
of Amiens, set to work to build a tower to 
their own cathedral as high as they possibly 
could. They built it so high , that it tumbled 
down, and they were never able to finish their 
cathedral at all— it stands a wreck to this day. 
But you will not, I should think, imagine this 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 4 1 

to have been done in heavenward aspiration. 
Mind, however, I don't blame the people of 
Beauvais, except for their bad building. I 
think their desire to beat the citizens of 
Amiens a most amiable weakness, and only 
wish I could see the citizens of Edinburgh and 
Glasgow inflamed with the same emulation, 
building Gothic towers* instead of manufac- 
tory chimneys. Only do not confound a feeling 
which, though healthy and right, may be nearly 
analogous to that in which you play a cricket- 
match, with any feeling allied to your hope of 
heaven. 

20. Such being the state of the case with re- 
spect to tower-building in general, let me follow 
for a few minutes the changes which occur in 
the towers of northern and southern architects. 

Many of us are familiar with the ordinary 
form of the Italian bell-tower or campanile. 
From the eighth century to the thirteenth there 
was little change in that form : -f* four-square, 

* I did not, at the time of the delivery of these lectures, 
know how many Gothic towers the worthy Glaswegians 
have lately built : that of St. Peter's, in particular, being a 
most meritorious effort. 

t There is a good abstract of the forms of the Italian 
campanile, by Mr. Papworth, in the Journal of the Archaeo- 
logical Institute, March 1850. 



42 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

rising high and without tapering into the air, 
story above story, they stood like giants in the 
quiet fields beside the piles of the basilica or 
the Lombardic church, in this form {Jig. 9), 
tiled at the top in a flat gable, with open arches 
below, and fewer and fewer arches on each 
inferior story, down to the bottom. It is worth 
while noting the difference in form between 
these and the towers built for military service. 
The latter were built as in fig. 10, projecting 
vigorously at the top over a series of brackets 
or machicolations, with very small windows, and 
no decoration below. Such towers as these 
were attached to every important palace in the 
cities of Italy, and stood in great circles — 
troops of towers — around their external walls : 
their ruins still frown along the crests of every 
promontory of the Apennines, and are seen 
from far away in the great Lombardic plain, 
from distances of half-a-day's journey, dark 
against the amber sky of the horizon. These 
are of course now built no more, the changed 
methods of modern warfare having cast them 
into entire disuse ; but the belfry or campanile 
has had a very different influence on European 
architecture. Its form in the plains of Italy 



Plate VI. 





Fig. 10. 



Fig. 9. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 43 

and South France being that just shown you, 
the moment we enter the valleys of the Alps, 
where there is snow to be sustained, we find 
its form of roof altered by the substitution 
of a steep gable for a flat one.* There are 
probably few in the room who have not been 
in some parts of South Switzerland, and who 
do not remember the beautiful effect of the 
grey mountain churches, many of them hardly 
changed since the tenth and eleventh centuries, 
whose pointed towers stand up through the 
green level of the vines, or crown the jutting 
rocks that border the valley. 

21. From this form to the true spire the 
change is slight, and consists in little more 
than various decoration; generally in putting 
small pinnacles at the angles, and piercing the 
central pyramid with traceried windows ; some- 
times, as at Fribourg and Burgos, throwing it 
into tracery altogether : but to do this is in- 
variably the sign of a vicious style, as it takes 
away from the spire its character of a true 
roof, and turns it nearly into an ornamental 

* The form establishes itself afterwards in the plains, in 
sympathy with other Gothic conditions, as in the campanile 
of St. Mark's at Venice. 



44 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

excrescence. At Antwerp and Brussels, the 
celebrated towers (one, observe, ecclesiastical, 
being the tower of the cathedral, and the other 
secular), are formed by successions of diminish- 
ing towers, set one above the other, and each 
supported by buttresses thrown to the angles 
of the one beneath. At the English cathedrals 
of Lichfield and Salisbury, the spire is seen in 
great purity, only decorated by sculpture ; but I 
am aware of no example so striking in its entire 
simplicity as that of the towers of the cathedral 
of Coutances in Normandy. There is a dispute 
between French and English antiquaries as to 
the date of the building, the English being un- 
willing to admit its complete priority to all their 
own Gothic. I have no doubt of this priority 
myself; and I hope that the time will soon 
come when men will cease to confound vanity 
with patriotism, and will think the honour of 
their nation more advanced by their own sin- 
cerity and courtesy, than by claims, however 
learnedly contested, to the invention of pin- 
nacles and arches. I believe the French nation 
was, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the 
greatest in the world ; and that the French not 
only invented Gothic architecture, but carried 



Plate VII. 





Fig. ii. 



Fig. 12. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 45 

it to a perfection which no other nation has 
approached, then or since : but, however this 
may be, there can be no doubt that the towers 
of Coutances, if not the earliest, are among the 
very earliest, examples of the fully developed 
spire. I have drawn one of them carefully for 
you {fig. 1 1), and you will see immediately that 
they are literally domestic roofs, with garret 
windows, executed on a large scale, and in 
stone. Their only ornament is a kind of scaly 
mail, which is nothing more than the copying 
in stone of the common wooden shingles of the 
house-roof; and their security is provided for 
by strong gabled dormer windows, of massy 
masonry, which, though supported on detached 
shafts, have weight enough completely to bal- 
ance the lateral thrusts of the spires. Nothing 
can surpass the boldness or the simplicity of the 
plan ; and yet, in spite of this simplicity, the 
clear detaching of the shafts from the slope of 
the spire, and their great height, strengthened 
by rude cross-bars of stone, carried back to the 
wall behind, occasion so great a complexity 
and play of cast shadows, that I remember no 
architectural composition of which the aspect 
is so completely varied at different hours of the 



46 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

day.* But the main thing I wish you to ob- 
serve is, the complete domesticity of the work ; 
the evident treatment of the church spire 
merely as a magnified house-roof; and the 
proof herein of the great truth of which I have 
been endeavouring to persuade you, that all 
good architecture rises out of good and simple 
domestic work ; and that, therefore, before you 
attempt to build great churches and palaces, 
you must build good house doors and garret 
windows. 

22. Nor is the spire the only ecclesiastical 
form deducible from domestic architecture. 
The spires of France and Germany are asso- 
ciated with other towers, even simpler and 
more straightforward in confession of their 
nature, in which, though the walls of the 
tower are covered with sculpture, there is an 
ordinary ridged gable roof on the top. The 
finest example I know of this kind of tower, 
is that on the north-west angle of Rouen 
Cathedral {fig. 12); but they occur in multi- 
tudes in the older towns of Germany; and 
the backgrounds of Albert Diirer are full 

* The sketch was made about ten o'clock on a September 
morning. . 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 47 

of them, and owe to them a great part of 
their interest : all these great and magnificent 
masses of architecture being repeated on a 
smaller scale by the little turret roofs and 
pinnacles of every house in the town; and 
the whole system of them being expressive, 
not by any means of religious feeling,* but 

* Among the various modes in which the architects, 
against whose practice my writings are directed, have en- 
deavoured to oppose them, no charge has been made more 
frequently than that of their self-contradiction ; the fact 
being, that there are few people in the world who are 
capable of seeing the two sides of any subject, or of con- 
ceiving how the statements of its opposite aspects can 
possibly be reconcilable. For instance, in a recent review, 
though for the most part both fair and intelligent, it is 
remarked, on this very subject of the domestic origin of the 
northern Gothic, that " Mr. Ruskin is evidently possessed 
by a fixed idea, that the Venetian architects were devout 
men, and that their devotion was expressed in their build- 
ings ; while he will not allow our own cathedrals to have 
been built by any but worldly men, who had no thoughts 
of heaven, but only vague ideas of keeping out of hell, by 
erecting costly places of worship." If this writer had com- 
pared the two passages with the care which such a subject 
necessarily demands, he would have found that I was not 
opposing Venetian to English piety; but that in the one 
case I was speaking of the spirit manifested in the entire 
architecture of the nation, and in the other of occasional 
efforts of superstition as distinguished from that spirit ; and, 
farther, that in the one case, I was speaking of decorative 
features, which are ordinarily the results of feelings, in the 
other of structural features, which are ordinarily the results 



48 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

merely of joyfulness and exhilaration of spirit 
in the inhabitants of such cities, leading them 
to throw their roofs high into the sky, and 
therefore giving to the style of architecture 
with which these grotesque roofs are asso- 
ciated, a certain charm like that of cheerfulness 
in a human face ; besides a power of interest- 
ing the beholder which is testified, not only 
by the artist in his constant search after such 
forms as the elements of his landscape, but 
by every phrase of our language and litera- 
ture bearing on such topics. Have not these 
words, Pinnacle, Turret, Belfry, Spire, Tower, 
a pleasant sound in all your ears ? I do 
not speak of your scenery, I do not ask you 
how much you feel that it owes to the grey 

of necessity or convenience. Thus it is rational and just 
that we should attribute the decoration of the arches of St. 
Mark's with scriptural mosaics to a religious sentiment ; but 
it would be a strange absurdity to regard as an effort of 
piety the invention of the form of the arch itself, of which 
one of the earliest and most perfect instances is in the Cloaca 
Maxima. And thus in the case of spires and towers, it 
is just to ascribe to the devotion of their designers that 
dignity which was bestowed upon forms derived from the 
simplest domestic buildings ; but it is ridiculous to attribute 
any great refinement of religious feeling, or height of re- 
ligious aspiration, to those who furnished the funds for the 
erection of the loveliest tower in North France, by paying 
for permission to eat butter in Lent. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 49 

battlements that frown through the woods of 
Craigmillar, to the pointed turrets that flank 
the front of Holyrood, or to the massy keeps 
of your Crichtoun and Borthwick and other 
border towers. But look merely through your 
poetry and romances ; take away out of your 
border ballads the word tower wherever it 
occurs, and the ideas connected with it, and 
what will become of the ballads? See how 
Sir Walter Scott cannot even get through a 
description of Highland scenery without help 
from the idea :- — 

" Each purple peak, each flinty spire y 
Was bathed in floods of living fire." 

Take away from Scott's romances the word 
and idea turret^ and see how much you would 
lose. Suppose, for instance, when young Os- 
baldistone is leaving Osbaldistone Hall, in- 
stead of saying " The old clock struck two 
from a turret adjoining my bedchamber," he 
had said, " The old clock struck two from the 
landing at the top of the stair," what would 
become of the passage ? And can you really 
suppose that what has so much power over 

you in words has no power over you in reality? 

D 



50 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

"Do- you-- think there is any group of words 
which would thus interest you, when the things 
expressed by them are uninteresting? 

23. For instance, you know that, for an 
immense time back, all your public buildings 
have been built with a row of pillars support- 
ing a triangular thing called a pediment. You 
see this form every day in your banks and 
clubhouses, and churches and chapels ; you 
are told that it is the perfection of architectural 
beauty ; and yet suppose Sir Walter Scott, 
instead of writing, " Each purple peak, each 
flinty spire," had written, ri Each purple peak, 
each flinty * pediment/ " * Would you have 

* It has been objected to this comparison that the form of 
the pediment does not properly represent that of the rocks 
of the Trossachs. The objection is utterly futile, for there is 
not a single spire or pinnacle from one end of the Trossachs 
to the other. All their rocks are heavily rounded, and the 
introduction of the word " spire" is a piece of inaccuracy in 
description, ventured merely for the sake of the Gothic image. 
Farther : it has been said that -if I had substituted the word 
" gable," it would have spoiled the line just as much as the 
word " pediment," though " gable" is a Gothic word. Of 
course it would; but why? Because "gable" is a term of 
vulgar domestic architecture, and therefore destructive of 
the tone of the heroic description; whereas "pediment" 
and " spire " are precisely correlative terms, being each the 
crowning feature in ecclesiastical edifices, and the com- 
parison of their effects in the verse is therefore absolutely 
accurate, logical, and just. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 5 I 

thought the poem improved ? And if not, why 
would it be spoiled ? Simply because the idea 
is no longer of any value to you ; the thing 
spoken of is a nonentity. These pediments, 
and stylobates, and architraves never excited 
a single pleasurable feeling in you — never will, 
to the end of time. They are evermore dead, 
lifeless, and useless, in art as in poetry, and 
though you built as many of them as there are 
slates on your house-roofs, you will never care 
for them. They will only remain to later ages 
as monuments of the patience and pliability 
with which the people of the nineteenth century 
sacrificed their feelings to fashions, and their 
intellects to forms. But on the other hand, 
that strange and thrilling interest with which 
such words strike you as are in any wise 
connected with Gothic architecture — as for 
instance, Vault, Arch, Spire, Pinnacle, Battle- 
ment, Barbican, Porch, and myriads of such 
others, words everlastingly poetical and power- 
ful whenever they occur,— is a most true and 
certain index that the things themselves are 
delightful to you, and will ever continue to 
be so. Believe me, you do indeed love these 
things, so far as you care about art at all, so 



52 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

Far as you are not ashamed to confess what 
you feel about them. 

24. In your public capacities, as bank 
directors, and charity overseers, and adminis- 
trators of this and that other undertaking or 
institution, you cannot express your feelings 
at all. You form committees to decide upon 
the style of the new building, and as you have 
never been in the habit of trusting to your 
own taste in such matters, you inquire who is 
the most celebrated, that is to say, the most 
employed, architect of the day. And you send 
for the great Mr. Blank, and the Great Blank 
sends you a plan of a great long marble box 
with half-a-dozen pillars at one end of it, and 
the same at the other; and you look at the 
Great Blank's great plan in a grave manner, 
and you daresay it will be very handsome; 
and you ask the Great Blank what sort of a 
blank cheque must be filled up before the great 
plan can be realised ; and you subscribe in a 
generous " burst of confidence " whatever is 
wanted ; and when it is all done, and the great 
white marble box is set up in your streets, 
you contemplate it, not knowing what to make 
of it exactly, but hoping it is all right; and 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 53 

then there is a dinner given to the Great 
Blank, and the morning papers say that the 
new and handsome building, erected by the 
great Mr. Blank, is one of Mr. Blank's happiest 
efforts, and reflects the^ greatest credit upon 
the intelligent inhabitants of the city of so- 
and-so; and the building keeps the rain out 
as well as another, and you remain in a placid 
state of impoverished satisfaction therewith ; 
but as for having any real pleasure out of it, 
you never hoped for such a thing. If you 
really make up a party of pleasure, and get 
rid of the forms and fashion of public propriety 
for an hour or two, where do you go for it ? 
Where do you go to eat strawberries and 
cream? To Roslin Chapel, I believe; not to 
the portico of the last-built institution. What 
do you see your children doing, obeying their 
own natural and true instincts ? What are 
your daughters drawing upon their cardboard 
screens as soon as they can use a pencil ? 
Not Parthenon fronts, I think, but the ruins 
of Melrose Abbey, or Linlithgow Palace, or 
Lochleven Castle, their own pure Scotch hearts 
leading them straight to the right things, in 
spite of all that they are told to the contrary. 



54 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

You perhaps call this romantic, and youthful, 
and foolish. I am pressed for time now, and I 
cannot ask you to consider the meaning of the 
word " Romance." I will do that, if you please, 
in next lecture, for it is a word of greater 
weight and authority than we commonly be- 
lieve. In the meantime, I will endeavour, 
lastly, to show you, not the romantic, but the 
plain and practical conclusions which should 
follow from the facts I have laid before you. 

25. I have endeavoured briefly to point out 
to you the propriety and naturalness of the 
two great Gothic forms, the pointed arch and 
gable roof. I wish now to tell you in what 
way they ought to be introduced into modern 
domestic architecture. 

You will all admit that there is neither 
romance nor comfort in waiting at your own 
or at any one else's door on a windy and rainy 
day, till the servant comes from the end of 
the house to open it. You all know the criti- 
cal nature of that opening — the drift of wind 
into the passage, the impossibility of putting 
down the umbrella at the proper moment with- 
out getting a cupful of water dropped down 
the back of your neck from the top of the 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 55 

doorway; and you know how little these 
inconveniences are abated by the common 
Greek portico at the top of the steps. You 
know how the east winds blow through those 
unlucky couples of pillars, which are all that 
your architects find consistent with due obser- 
vance of the Doric order. Then, away with 
these absurdities; and the next house you 
build, insist upon having the pure old Gothic 
porch, walled in on both sides, with its pointed 
arch entrance and gable roof above. Under 
that, you can put down your umbrella at your 
leisure, and, if you will, stop a moment to talk 
with your friend as you give him the parting 
shake of the hand. And if now and then a 
wayfarer found a moment's, rest on a stone 
seat on each side of it, I believe you would 
find the insides of your houses not one 
whit the less comfortable ; and, if you answer 
me, that were such refuges built in the open 
streets, they would become mere nests of filthy 
vagrants, I reply that I do not despair of such 
a change in the administration of the poor 
laws of this country, as shall no longer leave 
any of our fellow-creatures in a state in 
which they would pollute the steps of our 



$6 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

houses by resting upon them for a night. 
But if not, the command to all of us is strict 
and straight, "When thou seest the naked, 
that thou cover him, and that thou bring the 
poor that are cast out to thy house." * Not 
to the workhouse, observe, but to thy house : 
and I say it would be better a thousandfold, 
that our doors should be beset by the poor day 
by day, than that it should be written of any 
one of us, " They reap every one his corn in 
the field, and they gather the vintage of the 
wicked. They cause the naked to lodge without 
shelter, that they have no covering in the cold. 
They are wet with the showers of the mountains, 
and embrace the rock, for want of a shelter." f 
26. This, then, is the first use to which 
your pointed arches and gable roofs are to 
be put. The second is of more personal plea- 
surableness. You surely must all of you 
feel and admit the delightfulness of a bow 
window; I can hardly fancy a room can be 
perfect without one. Now you have nothing 
to do but to resolve that every one of your 
principal rooms shall have a bow window, 
either large or small. Sustain the projection 
* Isa. lviii. 7. t Job xxiv. 6-8. 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 57 

of it on a bracket, crown it above with a little 
peaked roof, and give a massy piece of stone 
sculpture to the pointed arch in each of its 
casements, and you will have as inexhaustible 
a source of quaint richness in your street 
architecture, as of additional comfort and de- 
light in the interiors of your rooms. 

27. Thirdly, as respects windows which do 
not project. You will find that the proposal 
to build them with pointed arches is met by 
an objection on the part of your architects, 
that you cannot fit them with comfortable 
sashes. I beg leave to tell you that such 
an objection is utterly futile and ridiculous. 
I have lived for months in Gothic palaces, 
with pointed windows of the most complicated 
forms, fitted with modern sashes; and with 
the most perfect comfort. But granting that 
the objection were a true one — and I suppose 
it is true to just this extent, that it may cost 
some few shillings more per window in the 
first instance to set the fittings to a pointed 
arch than to a square one — there is not the 
smallest necessity for the aperture of the 
window being of the pointed shape. Make 
the uppermost or bearing arch pointed only, 



5 8 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

and make the top of the window square, filling 
the interval with a stone shield, and you may 
have a perfect school of architecture, not only 
consistent with, but eminently conducive to, 
every comfort of your daily life. The window 
in Oakham Castle {fig. 2) is an example of 
such a form as actually employed in the 
thirteenth century ; and I shall have to notice 
another in the course of next lecture. 

28. Meanwhile, I have but one word to say, 
in conclusion. Whatever has been advanced 
in the course of this evening, has rested on 
the assumption that all architecture was to be 
of brick and stone ; and may meet with some 
hesitation in its acceptance, on account of the 
probable use of iron, glass, and such other 
materials in our future edifices. I cannot now 
enter into any statement of the possible uses 
of iron or glass, but I will give you one 
reason, which I think will weigh strongly with 
most here, why it is not likely that they will 
ever become important elements in architec- 
tural effect. I know that I am speaking to 
a company of philosophers, but you are not 
philosophers of the kind who suppose that 
the Bible is a superannuated book; neither 



I. ARCHITECTURE. 59 

are you of those who think the Bible is dis- 
honoured by being referred to for judgment 
in small matters. The very divinity of the 
Book seems to me, on the contrary, to justify 
us in referring every thing to it, with respect 
to which any conclusion can be gathered from 
its pages. Assuming then that the Bible is 
neither superannuated now, nor ever likely to 
be so, it will follow that the illustrations which 
the Bible employs are likely to be clear and 
intelligible illustrations to the end of time. 
I do not mean that everything spoken of in 
the Bible histories must continue to endure 
for all time, but that the things which the 
Bible uses for illustration of eternal truths are 
likely to remain eternally intelligible illustra- 
tions. Now, I find that iron architecture is 
indeed spoken of in the Bible. You know 
how it is said to Jeremiah, " Behold, I have 
made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron 
pillar, and brazen walls, against the whole 
land." But I do not find that iron building 
is ever alluded to as likely to become familiar 
to the minds of men; but, on the contrary, 
that an architecture of carved stone is con- 
tinually employed as a source of the most 



60 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

important illustrations. A simple instance 
must occur to all of you at once. The force 
of the image of the Corner Stone, as used 
throughout Scripture, would completely be 
lost, if the Christian and civilised world were 
ever extensively to employ any other material 
than earth and rock in their domestic build- 
ings: I firmly believe that they never will; 
but that as the laws of beauty are more 
perfectly established, we shall be content 
still to build as our forefathers built, and still 
to receive the same great lessons which such 
building is calculated to convey ; of which one 
is indeed never to be forgotten. Among the 
questions respecting towers which were laid 
before you to-night, one has been omitted: 
" What man is there of you intending to build 
a tower, that sitteth not down first and counteth 
the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish 
it ? " I have pressed upon you, this evening, 
the building of domestic towers. You may 
think it right to dismiss the subject at once 
from your thoughts; but let us not do so, 
without considering, each of us, how far that 
tower has been built, and how truly its cost 
has been counted. 



LECTURE II. 

ARCHITECTURE. 

Delivered November 4, 1853. 

29. BEFORE proceeding to the principal subject 
of this evening, I wish to anticipate one or two 
objections which may arise in your minds to 
what I must lay before you. It may perhaps 
have been felt by you last evening, that some 
things I proposed to you were either romantic 
or Utopian. Let us think for a few moments 
what romance and Utopianism mean. 

First, romance. In consequence of the many 
absurd fictions which long formed the elements 
of romance writing, the word romance is some- 
times taken as synonymous with falsehood. 
Thus the French talk of Des Romans, and 
thus the English use the word Romancing. 

But in this sense we had much better use 
the word falsehood at once. It is far plainer 

and clearer. And if in this sense I put 

61 



62 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

anything romantic before you, pray pay no 
attention to it, or to me. 

30. In the second place. Because young 
people are particularly apt to indulge in 
reverie, and imaginative pleasures, and to 
neglect their plain and practical duties, the 
word romantic has come to signify weak, 
foolish, speculative, unpractical, unprincipled. 
In all these cases it would be much better to 
say weak, foolish, unpractical, unprincipled. 
The words are clearer. If in this sense, also, 
I put anything romantic before you, pray pay 
no attention to me. 

31, But in the third and last place. The 
real and proper use of the word romantic is 
simply to characterise an improbable or un- 
accustomed degree of beauty, sublimity, or 
virtue. For instance, in matters of history, 
is not the Retreat of the Ten Thousand 
romantic ? Is not the death of Leonidas ? of 
the Horatii? On the other hand, you find 
nothing romantic, though much that is mon- 
strous, in the excesses of Tiberius or Corn- 
modus. So again, the battle of Agincourt is 
romantic, and of Bannockburn, simply because 
there was an extraordinary display of human 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 63 

virtue in both these battles. But there is no 
romance in the battles of the last Italian cam- 
paign, in which mere feebleness and distrust 
were on one side, mere physical force on the 
other. And even in fiction, the opponents of 
virtue, in order to be romantic, must have 
sublimity mingled with their vice. It is not 
the knave, not the ruffian, that are romantic, 
but the giant and the dragon ; and these, not 
because they are false, but because they are 
majestic. So again as to beauty. You feel 
that armour is romantic, because it is a beauti- 
ful dress, and you are not used to it. You do 
not feel there is anything romantic in the 
paint and shells of a Sandwich Islander, for 
these are not beautiful. 

32. So, then, observe, this feeling which 
you are accustomed to despise — this secret 
and poetical enthusiasm in all your hearts, 
which, as practical men, you try to restrain— 
is indeed one of the holiest parts of your 
being. It is the instinctive delight in, and 
admiration for, sublimity, beauty, and virtue, 
unusually manifested. And so far from being 
a dangerous guide, it is the truest part of your 
being. It is even truer than your consciences. 



64 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

A man's conscience may be utterly perverted 
and led astray ; but so long as the feelings of 
romance endure within us, they are unerring, 
— they are as true to what is right and lovely 
as the needle to the north ; and all that you 
have to do is to add to the enthusiastic senti- 
ment, the majestic judgment — to mingle pru- 
•dence and foresight with imagination and ad- 
miration, and you have the perfect human 
soul. But the great evil of these days is that 
we try to destroy the romantic feeling, instead 
of bridling and directing it. Mark what Young 
says of the men of the world : — 

" They, who think nought so strong of the romance, 
So rank knight-errant, as a real friend." 

And they are right. True friendship is roman- 
tic, to the men of the world — true affection is 
romantic— true religion is romantic ; and if you 
were to ask me who of all powerful and popular 
writers in the cause of error had wrought most 
harm to their race, I should hesitate in reply 
whether to name Voltaire, or Byron, or the 
last most ingenious and most venomous of the 
degraded philosophers of Germany, or rather 
Cervantes, for he cast scorn upon the holiest 



11. ARCHITECTURE. 65 

principles of humanity — he, of all men, most 
helped forward the terrible change in the sol- 
diers of Europe, from the spirit of Bayard to 
the spirit of Bonaparte,* helped to change 
loyalty . into license, protection into plunder, 
truth into treachery, chivalry into selfishness ; 
and, since his time, the purest impulses and 
the noblest purposes have perhaps been 
oftener stayed by the devil, under the name 
of Quixotism, than under any other base name 
or false allegation. 

33. Quixotism, or Utopianism; that is 
another of the devil's pet words. I believe 
the quiet admission which we are all of us 
so ready to make, that, because things have 
long been wrong, it is impossible they should 
ever be right, is one of the most fatal sources 
of misery and crime from which this world 
suffers. Whenever you hear a man dissuad- 
ing you from attempting to do well, on the 
ground that perfection is " Utopian," beware 
of that man. Cast the word out of your dic- 
tionary altogether. There is no need for 

* I mean no scandal against the present Emperor of the 
French, whose truth has, I believe, been as conspicuous in 
the late political negotiations, as his decision and prudence 
have been throughout the whole course of his government. 

E 



66 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

it. Things are either possible or impossible 
— you can easily determine which, in any 
given state of human science. If the thing 
is impossible, you need not trouble your- 
selves about it; if possible, try for it. It is 
very Utopian to hope for the entire doing 
away with drunkenness and misery out of 
the Canongate ; but the Utopianism is not our 
business — the work is. It is Utopian to hope 
to give every child in this kingdom the 
knowledge of God from its youth ; but the 
Utopianism is not our business — the work is. 

34. I have delayed you by the consideration 
of these two words, only in the fear that they 
might be inaccurately applied to the plans I 
am going to lay before you ; for, though they 
were Utopian, and though they were romantic, 
they might be none the worse for that. But 
they are neither. Utopian they are not; for 
they are merely a proposal to do again what 
has been done for hundreds of years by people 
whose wealth and power were as nothing com- 
pared to ours ; — and romantic they are not, 
in the sense of self-sacrificing or eminently 
virtuous, for they are merely the proposal 
to each of you that he should live in a 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 6j 

handsomer house than he does at present, by 
substituting a cheap mode of ornamentation for 
a costly one. You perhaps fancied that archi- 
tectural beauty was a very costly thing. Far 
from it. It is architectural ugliness that is 
costly. In the modern system of architec- 
ture, decoration is immoderately expensive, 
because it is both wrongly placed and wrongly 
finished. I say first, wrongly placed. Modern 
architects decorate the tops of their buildings. 
Mediaeval ones decorated the bottom.* That 
makes all the difference between seeing the 
ornament and not seeing it. If you bought 
some pictures to decorate such a room as 
this, where would you put them ? On a level 
with the eye, I suppose, or nearly so? Not 
on a level with the chandelier ? If you were 
determined to put them up there, round the 
cornice, it would be better for you not to 
buy them at all. You would merely throw 
your money away. And the fact is, that 
your money is being thrown aw ; ay continually, 
by wholesale ; and while you are dissuaded, 
on the ' ground of expense, from building 

* For farther confirmation of this statement see the 
Addenda at the end of this Lecture. - 



68 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

beautiful windows and beautiful doors, you 
are continually made to pay for ornaments at 
the tops of your houses, which, for all the 
use they are of, might as well be in the moon. 
For instance, there is not, on the whole, a 
more studied piece of domestic architecture 
in Edinburgh than the street in which so 
many of your excellent physicians live — Rut- 
land Street. I do not know if you have ob- 
served its architecture; but if you will look 
at it to-morrow, you will see that a heavy and 
close balustrade is put all along the eaves of 
the houses. Your physicians are not, I sup- 
pose, in the habit of taking academic and 
meditative walks on the roofs of their houses ; 
and, if not, this balustrade is altogether use- 
less, — nor merely useless, for you will find 
it runs directly in front of all the garret 
windows, thus interfering with their light, and 
blocking out their view of the street. All 
that the parapet is meant to do, is to give 
some finish to the facades, and the inhabi- 
tants have thus been made to pay a large 
sum for a piece of mere decoration. Whether 
it does finish the fagades satisfactorily, or 
whether the physicians resident in the street, 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 69 

or their patients, are in anywise edified by 
the succession of pear-shaped knobs of stone 
on their house-tops, I leave them to tell you; 
only do not fancy that the design, whatever 
its success, is an economical one. 

35. But this is a very slight waste of money, 
compared to the constant habit of putting careful 
sculpture at the tops of houses. A temple of 
luxury has just been built in London for the 
Army and Navy Club. It cost £40,000, exclu- 
sive of purchase of ground. It has upon it an 
enormous quantity of sculpture, representing 
the gentlemen of the navy as little boys riding 
upon dolphins, and the gentlemen of the army 
— I couldn't see as what — nor can anybody ; 
for all this sculpture is put up at the top of 
the house, where the gutter should be, under 
the cornice. I know that this was a Greek 
way of doing things. I can't help it; that 
does not make it a wise one. Greeks might 
be willing to pay for what they couldn't see, 
but Scotchmen and Englishmen shouldn't. 

36. Not that the Greeks threw their work 
away as we do. As far as I know Greek 
buildings, their ornamentation, though often 
bad, is always bold enough and large enough 



2P ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

to be visible in its place. It is not putting 
ornament high that is wrong ; but it is cutting 
it too fine to be seen, wherever it is. This is 
the great modern mistake : you are actually 
at twice the cost which would produce an im- 
pressive ornament, to produce a contemptible 
one ; you increase the price of your buildings 
by one-half, in, order to mince their decoration 
into invisibility. Walk through your streets, 
and try to make out the ornaments on the 
upper parts of your fine buildings — (there are 
none at the bottoms of them). Don't do it 
long, or you will all come home with inflamed 
eyes, but you will soon discover that you 
can see nothing but confusion in ornaments 
that have cost you ten or twelve shillings a 
foot. 

37. Now, the Gothic builders placed their 
decoration on a precisely contrary principle, 
and on the only rational principle. All their 
best and most delicate work they put on the 
foundation of the building, close to the spec- 
tator, and on the upper parts of the walls they 
put ornaments large, bold, and capable of being 
plainly seen at the necessary distance. A single 
example will enable you to understand this 



Plate VIII. 




Fig. 13. 




Fig. 14. 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 7 1 

method of adaptation perfectly. The lower 
part of the facade of the cathedral of Lyons, 
built either late in the thirteenth or early in 
the fourteenth century, is decorated with a 
series of niches, filled by statues of consider- 
able size, which are supported upon pedestals 
within about eight feet of the ground. In 
general, pedestals of this kind are supported 
on some projecting portion of the basement; 
but at Lyons, owing to other arrangements 
of the architecture into which I have no time 
to enter, they are merely projecting tablets, or 
flat-bottomed brackets of stone, projecting from 
the wall. Each bracket is about a foot and 
a half square, and is shaped thus {fig* 13), 
showing to the spectator, as he walks beneath, 
the flat bottom of each bracket, quite in the 
shade, but within a couple of feet of the eye, 
and lighted by the reflected light from the 
pavement. The whole of the surface of the 
wall round the great entrance is covered with 
bas-relief, as a matter of course ; but the archi- 
tect appears to have been jealous of the smallest 
space which was well within the range of sight ; 
and the bottom of every bracket is decorated 
also — nor that slightly, but decorated with no 



72 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

fewer than six figures each, besides a flower 
border, in a space, as I said, not quite a foot 
and a half square. The shape of the field to 
be decorated being a kind of quatrefoil, as 
shown in fig. 13, four small figures are placed, 
one in each foil, and two larger ones in the 
centre. I had only time, in passing through 
the town, to make a drawing of one of the 
angles of these pedestals ; that sketch I have 
enlarged, in order that you may have some idea 
of the character of the sculpture. Here is the 
enlargement of it {fig. 15). Now observe, 
this is one of the angles of the bottom of a 
pedestal, not two feet broad, on the, outside 
of a Gothic building ; it contains only one of 
the four little figures which fprm those angles ; 
and it shows you the head only of one of the 
larger figures in the centre. Yet just observe 
how much design, how much wonderful compo- 
sition, there is in this mere fragment of a build- 
ing of the great times ; a fragment, literally no 
larger than a schoolboy could strike off in 
wantonness with a stick : and yet I cannot tell 
you how much care has been spent — not so 
much on the execution, for it does not take 
much trouble to execute well on so small a 



Plate IX. 




Fig. 15- 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 73 

scale — but on the design, of this minute frag- 
ment. You see it is composed of a branch 
of wild roses, which switches round at the 
angle, embracing the minute figure of the 
bishop, and terminates in a spray reaching 
nearly to the head of the large figure. You 
will observe how beautifully that figure is thus 
pointed to by the spray of rose, and how all 
the leaves around it in the same manner are 
subservient to the grace of its action. Look, 
if I hide one line, or one rosebud, how the 
whole is injured, and how much there is to 
study in the detail of it. Look at this little 
diamond crown, with a lock of the hair escaping 
from beneath it ; and at the beautiful way in 
which the tiny leaf at a } is set in the angle to 
prevent its harshness; and having examined 
this well, consider what a treasure of thought 
there is in a cathedral front, a hundred feet 
wide, every inch of which is wrought with 
sculpture like this ! And every front of our 
thirteenth century cathedrals is inwrought with 
sculpture of this quality ! And yet you quietly 
allow yourselves to be told that the men who 
thus wrought were barbarians, and that your 
architects are wiser and better in covering 



74 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

your walls with sculpture of this kind {fig. 14, 
Plate VIII.) 

38. Walk round your Edinburgh buildings, 
and look at the height of your eye, what 
you will get from them. Nothing but square- 
cut stone — square-cut stone — a wilderness of 
square-cut stone for ever and for ever; so 
that your houses look like prisons, and truly 
are so ; for the worst feature of Greek archi- 
tecture is, indeed, not its costliness, but its 
tyranny. These square stones are not prisons 
of the body, but graves of the soul; for the 
very men who could do sculpture like this of 
Lyons for you are here! still here, in your 
despised workmen : the race has not degene- 
rated, it is you who have bound them down, 
and buried them beneath your Greek stones. 
There would be a resurrection of them, as 
of renewed souls, if you would only lift the 
weight of these weary walls from off their 
hearts.* 

39. But I am leaving the point immediately 
in question, which, you will remember, was 
the proper adaptation of ornament to its 

* This subject is farther pursued in the Addenda at the 
end of this Lecture. 



Plate X. 




Fig. 16. 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 75 

distance from the eye. I have given you 
one example of Gothic ornament, meant to be 
seen close ; now let me give you one of Gothic 
ornament intended to be seen far off. Here 
(Jig. 16) is a sketch of a niche at Amiens 
Cathedral, some fifty or sixty feet high on the 
facade, and seven or eight feet wide. Now 
observe, in the ornament close to the eye, you 
had six figures and a whole wreath of roses in, 
the space of a foot and a half square ; but in 
the ornament sixty feet from the eye, you have 
now only ten or twelve large leaves in a space 
of eight feet square ! and note also that now 
there is no attempt whatsoever at the refine- 
ment of line and finish of edge which there 
was in the other example. The sculptor knew 
that, at the height of this niche, people would 
not attend to the delicate lines, and that the 
broad shadows would catch the eye instead. 
He has therefore left, as you see, rude square 
edges to his niche, and carved his leaves as 
massively and broadly as possible: and yet, 
observe how dexterously he has given you a 
sense of delicacy and minuteness in the work, 
by mingling these small leaves among the large 
ones. . I made this sketch from a photograph, 



j6 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

and the spot in which these leaves occurred 
was obscure ; I have, therefore, used those of 
the Oxalis acetosella, of which the quaint form 
is always interesting. 

40. And you see by this example also what 
I meant just now by saying, that our own 
ornament was not only wrongly placed, but 
wrongly FINISHED. The very qualities which 
Jit this leaf-decoration for due effect upon 
the eye, are those which would conduce to 
economy in its execution. A more expensive 
ornament would be less effective ; and it is the 
very price we pay for finishing our decorations 
which spoils our architecture. And the curious 
thing is, that while you all appreciate, and 
that far too highly, what is called " the bold 
style " in painting, you cannot appreciate it in 
sculpture. You like a hurried, broad, dashing 
manner of execution in a water-colour draw- 
ing, though that may be seen as near as 
you choose, and yet you refuse to admit the 
nobleness of a bold, simple, and dashing stroke 
of the chisel in work which is to be seen forty 
fathoms off. Be assured that " handling" is 
as great a thing in marble as in paint, and that 
the power of producing a masterly effect with 



II. ARCHITECTURE. "JJ 

few touches is as essential in an architect as 
in a draughtsman; though indeed that power is 
never perfectly attained except by those who 
possess the power of giving the highest finish 
when there is occasion. 

41. But there is yet another and a weightier 
charge to be brought against our modern 
Pseudo- Greek ornamentation. It is, first, 
wrongly placed; secondly, wrongly finished; 
and, thirdly, utterly without meaning. Ob- 
serve in these two Gothic ornaments, and in 
every other ornament that ever was carved 
in the great Gothic times, there is a definite 
aim at the representation of some natural 
object. In Jig. 15 you have an exquisite 
group of rose-stems, with the flowers and 
buds; in Jig. 16, various wild weeds, espe- 
cially the Geranium pratense; in every case 
you have an approximation to a natural form, 
and an unceasing variety of suggestion. But 
how much of Nature have you in your Greek 
buildings ? I will show you, taking for an 
example the best you have lately built ; and, 
in doing so, I trust that nothing that I say 
will be thought to have any personal pur- 
pose, and that the architect of the building in 



78 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

question will forgive me; for it is just because 
it is a good example of the style that I think 
it more fair to use it for an example. If the 
building were a bad one of the kind, it would 
not be a fair instance ; . and I hope, therefore, 
that in speaking of the institution on the 
Mound, just in progress, I shall be understood 
as meaning rather a compliment to its architect 
than otherwise. It is not his fault that we 
force him to build in the Greek manner. 

42. Now, according to the orthodox practice 
in modern architecture, the most delicate and 
minute pieces of sculpture on that building 
are at the very top of it, just under its gutter. 
You cannot see them in a dark day, and per- 
haps may never, to this hour, have noticed 
them at all. But there they are : sixty-six 
finished heads of lions, all exactly the same; 
and, therefore, I suppose, executed on some 
noble Greek type, too noble to allow any 
modest Modern to think of improving upon 
it. But whether executed on a Greek type 
or no, it is to be presumed that, as there are 
sixty-six of them alike, and on so important 
a building as that which is to contain your 
school of design, and which is the principal 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 79 

example of the Athenian style in modern 
Athens, there must be something especially 
admirable in them, and deserving your most 
attentive contemplation. In order, therefore, 
that you might have a fair opportunity of 
estimating their beauty, I was desirous of 
getting a sketch of a real lion's head to com- 
pare with them, and my friend Mr. Millais 
kindly offered to draw both the one and the 
other for me. You have not, however, at 
present, a lion in your zoological collection; 
and it being, as you are probably aware, 
the first principle of Pre-Raphaelitism, as well 
as essential to my object in the present in- 
stance, that no drawing should be made except 
from Nature itself, I was obliged to be con- 
tent with a tiger's head, which, however, will 
answer my purpose just as well, in enabling 
you to compare a piece of true, faithful, and 
natural work with modern architectural sculp- 
ture. Here, in the first place, is Mr. Millais' 
drawing from the living beast {fig. 17, frontis- 
piece). I have not the least fear but that you 
will at once acknowledge its truth and feel 
its power. Prepare yourselves next for the 
Grecian sublimity of the ideal beast, from the 



80 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

cornice of your schools of design. Behold it 
{fig. 18). 

43. Now we call ourselves civilised and 
refined in matters of art, but I assure you it 
is seldom that, in the very basest and coarsest 
grotesques of the inferior Gothic workmen, 
anything so contemptible as this head can be 
ever found. They only sink into such a failure 
accidentally, and in a single instance ; and we, 
in our civilisation, repeat this noble piece of 
work threescore and six times over, as not 
being able to invent anything else so good ! 
Do not think Mr. Millais has caricatured it. 
It is drawn with the strictest fidelity; photo- 
graph one of the heads to-morrow, and you 
will find the photograph tell you the same 
tale. Neither imagine that this is an unusual 
example of modern work. Your banks and 
public offices are covered with ideal lions' 
heads in every direction, and you will find 
them all just as bad as this. And, farther, 
note that the admission of such barbarous 
types of sculpture is not merely ridiculous ; it 
is seriously harmful to your powers of per- 
ceiving truth or beauty of any kind or at any 
time. Imagine the effect on the minds of your 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 8 1 

children of having such representations of a 
lion's head as this thrust upon them per- 
petually ; and consider what a different effect 
might be produced upon them if, instead 
of this barren and insipid absurdity, every 
boss on your buildings were, according to the 
workman's best ability, a faithful rendering of 
the form of some existing animal, so that all 
their walls were so many pages of natural 
history. And, finally, consider the difference, 
with respect to the mind of the workman 
himself, between being kept all his life carving, 
by sixties, and forties, and thirties, repetitions 
of one false and futile model, — and being sent, 
for every piece of work he had to execute, to 
make a stern and faithful study from some 
living creature of God. 

44. And this last consideration enables me 
to press this subject on you on far higher 
grounds than I have done yet. 

I have hitherto appealed only to your na- 
tional pride, or to your common sense; but 
surely I should- treat a Scottish audience with 
indignity if I appealed not finally to some- 
thing higher than either of them, — to their 
religious principles. 

F 



82 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

You know how often it is difficult to be 
wisely charitable, to do good without multi- 
plying the sources of evil. You know that to 
give alms is nothing unless you give thought 
also; and that therefore it is written, not 
"blessed is he that feedeth the poor," but, 
"blessed is he that considereth the poor." 
And you know that a little thought and a 
little kindness are often worth more than a 
great deal of money. 

45. Now this charity of thought is not 
merely to be exercised towards the poor; it 
is to be exercised towards all men. There is 
assuredly no action of our social life, however 
unimportant, which, by kindly thought, may 
not be made to have a beneficial influence 
upon others; and it is impossible to spend 
the smallest sum of money, for any not ab- 
solutely necessary purpose, without a grave 
responsibility attaching to the manner of spend- 
ing it. The object we ourselves covet may, 
indeed, be desirable and harmless, so far as 
we are concerned, but the providing us with 
it may, perhaps, be a very prejudicial occupa- 
tion to some one else. And then it becomes 
instantly a moral question, whether we are to 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 83 

indulge ourselves or not. Whatever we wish 
to buy, we ought first to consider not only if 
the thing be fit For us, but if the manufacture 
of it be a wholesome and happy one ; and if, 
on the whole, the sum we are going to spend 
will do as much good spent in this way as it 
would if spent in any other way. It may be 
said that we have not time to consider all this 
before we make a purchase. But no time 
could be spent in a more important duty ; and 
God never imposes a duty without giving the 
time to do it. Let us, however, only acknow- 
ledge the principle; — once make up your mind 
to allow the consideration of the effect of your 
purchases to regulate the kind of your pur- 
chase, and you will soon easily find grounds 
enough to decide upon. The plea of ignorance 
will never take away our responsibilities. It 
is written, " If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it 
not; doth not He that pondereth the heart 
consider it ? and He that keepeth thy soul, 
doth not He know it ? " 

46. I could press this on you at length, but 
I hasten to apply the principle to the subject 
of art. I will do so broadly at first, and then 
come to architecture. Enormous sums are 



84 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

spent annually by this country in what is 
called patronage of art, but in what is for the 
most part merely buying what strikes our 
fancies. True and judicious patronage there 
is indeed; many a work of art is bought by 
those who do not care for its possession, to 
assist the struggling artist, or relieve the un- 
successful one. But for the most part, I fear 
we are too much, in the habit of buying simply 
what we like best, wholly irrespective of any 
good to be done, either to the artist or to the 
schools of the country. Now let us remember, 
that every farthing we spend on objects of art 
has influence over men's minds and spirits, far 
more than over their bodies. By the purchase 
of every print which hangs on your walls, of 
every cup out of which you drink, and every 
table off which you eat your bread, you are 
educating a mass of men in one way or another. 
You are either employing them healthily or 
unwholesomely ; you are making them lead 
happy or unhappy lives ; you are leading them 
to look at Nature, and to love her — to think, to 
feel, to enjoy, — or you are blinding them to 
Nature, and keeping them bound, like beasts 
of burden, in mechanical and monotonous 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 85 

employments. We shall all be asked one 
day, why we did not think more of this. 

47. "Well, but," you will say, "how can we 
decide what we ought to buy, but by our 
likings ? You would not have us buy what 
we don't like?" No, but I would have you 
thoroughly sure that there is an absolute right 
and wrong in all art, and try to find out the 
right, and like that , and, secondly, sometimes 
to sacrifice a careless preference or fancy, to 
what you know is for the good of your fellow- 
creatures. For instance, when you spend a 
guinea upon an engraving, what have you 
done ? You have paid a man for a certain 
number of hours to sit at a dirty table, in a 
dirty room, inhaling the fumes of nitric acid, 
stooping over a steel plate, on which, by the 
help of a magnifying glass, he is, one by one, 
laboriously cutting out certain notches and 
scratches, of which the effect is to be the copy 
of another man's work. You cannot suppose 
you have done a very charitable thing in this !. 
On the other hand, whenever you buy a small 
water-colour drawing, you have employed a 
man happily and healthily, working in a clean 
room (if he likes), or more probably still, out 



86 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

in the pure country and fresh air, thinking 
about something, and learning something every 
moment ; not straining his eyesight, nor break- 
ing his back, but working in ease and hap- 
piness. Therefore if you can like a modest 
water-colour better than an elaborate engrav- 
ing, do. There may indeed be engravings which 
are worth the suffering it costs to produce 
them; but at all events, engravings of public 
dinners and laying of foundation-stones, and 
such things, might be dispensed with. The 
engraving ought to be a first-rate picture of a 
first-rate subject to be worth buying. 

48. Farther, I know that many conscientious 
persons are desirous of encouraging art, but 
feel at the same time that their judgment is 
not certain enough to secure their choice of 
the best kind of art. To such persons I would 
now especially address myself, fully admitting 
the greatness of their difficulty. It is not an 
easy thing to acquire a knowledge of painting ; 
and it is by no means a desirable thing to en- 
courage bad painting. One bad painter makes 
another, and one bad painting will often spoil 
a great many healthy judgments. I could 
name popular painters now living, who have 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 87 

retarded the taste of their generation by twenty 
years. Unless, therefore, we are certain not 
merely that we like a painting, but that we are 
right in liking it, we should never buy it. For 
there is one way of spending money which 
is perfectly safe, and in which we may be 
absolutely sure of doing good. I mean, by 
paying for simple sculpture of natural objects, 
chiefly flowers and animals. You are aware 
that the possibilities of error in sculpture are 
much less than in painting ; it is altogether an 
easier and simpler art, invariably attaining per- 
fection long before painting, in the progress of 
a national mind. It may indeed be corrupted 
by false taste, or thrown into erroneous forms; 
but for the most part, the feebleness of a 
sculptor is shown in imperfection and rude- 
ness, rather than in definite error. He does 
not reach the fineness of the forms of Nature ; 
but he approaches them truly up to a certain 
point, or, if not so, at all events an honest 
effort will continually improve him : so that if 
we set a simple natural form before him, and 
tell him to copy it, we are sure we have given 
him a wholesome and useful piece of education; 
but if we told him to paint it, he might, with 



88 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

all the honesty in the world, paint it wrongly 
and falsely, to the end of his days. 

49. So much for the workman. But the 
workman is not the only person concerned. 
Observe farther, that when you buy a print, 
the enjoyment of it is confined to yourself and 
to your friends. But if you carve a piece of 
stone, and put it on the outside of your house, 
it will give pleasure to every person who 
passes along the street — to an innumerable 
multitude, instead of a few. 

Nay, but, you say, we ourselves shall not be 
benefited by the sculpture on the outsides of 
our houses. Yes, you will, and in an extra- 
ordinary degree ; for, observe farther, that 
architecture differs from painting peculiarly 
in being an art of accumulation. The prints 
bought by your friends, and hung up in their 
houses, have no collateral effect with yours : 
they must be separately examined, and if ever 
they were hung side by side, they would rather 
injure than assist each other's effect. But the 
sculpture on your friend's house unites in effect 
with that on your own. The two houses form 
one grand mass — far grander than either sepa- 
rately ; much more if a third be added — and a 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 89 

fourth ; much more if the whole street — if the 
whole city — join in the solemn harmony of 
sculpture. Your separate possessions of pic- 
tures and prints are to you as if you sang 
pieces of music with your single voices in your 
own houses. But your architecture would be 
as if you all sang together in one mighty choir. 
In the separate picture, it is rare that there 
exists any very high source of sublime emotion; 
but the great concerted music of the streets of 
the city, when turret rises over turret, and 
casement frowns beyond casement, and tower 
succeeds to tower along the farthest ridges 
of the inhabited hills, — this is a sublimity of 
which you can at present form no conception ; 
and capable, I believe, of exciting almost the 
deepest emotion that art can ever strike from 
the bosoms of men. 

And justly the deepest : for it is a law of 
God and of Nature, that your pleasures — as 
your virtues — shall be enhanced by mutual 
aid. As, by joining hand in hand, you can 
sustain each other best, so, hand in hand, you 
can delight each other best. And there is 
indeed a charm and sacredness in street archi- 
tecture which must be wanting even to that of 



gO ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

the temple : it is a little thing for men to unite 
in the forms of a religious service, but it is 
much for them to unite, like true brethren, in 
the arts and offices of their daily lives. 

50. And now, I can conceive only of one 
objection as likely still to arise in your minds, 
which I must briefly meet. Your pictures, 
and other smaller works of art, you can carry 
with you, wherever you live ; your house must 
be left behind. Indeed, I believe that the 
wandering habits which have now become 
almost necessary to our existence, lie more 
at the root of our bad architecture than any 
other character of modern times. We always 
look upon our houses as mere temporary 
lodgings. We are always hoping to get larger 
and finer ones, or are forced, in some way or 
other, to live where we do not choose, and 
in continual expectation of changing our place 
of abode. In the present state of society, 
this is in a great measure unavoidable; but 
let us remember it is an evil ; and that so 
far as it is avoidable, it becomes our duty 
to check the impulse. It is not for me to 
lead you at present into any consideration 
of a matter so closely touching your private 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 9 1 

interests and feelings ; but it surely is a subject 
for serious thought, whether it might not be 
better for many of us, if, on attaining a certain 
position in life, we determined, with God's per- 
mission, to choose a home in which to live 
and die, — a home not to be increased by 
adding stone to stone and field to field, but 
which, being enough for all our wishes at that 
period, we should resolve to be satisfied with 
for ever. Consider this; and also, whether 
we ought not to be more in the habit of 
seeking honour from our descendants than our 
ancestors; thinking it better to be nobly re- 
membered than nobly born; and striving so 
to live, that our sons, and our sons' sons, 
for ages to come, might still lead their children 
reverently to the doors out of which we had 
been carried to the grave, saying, " Look : This 
was his house : This was his chamber." 

51. I believe that you can bring forward 
no other serious objection to the principles 
for which I am pleading. They are so simple, 
and, it seems to me, so incontrovertible, that 
I trust you will not leave this room, without 
determining, as you have opportunity, to do 
something to advance this long-neglected art 



92 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

of domestic architecture. The reasons I have 
laid before you would have weight, even were 
I to ask you to go to some considerable 
expenditure beyond what you at present are 
accustomed to devote to such purposes; but 
nothing more would be needed than the diver- 
sion of expenditures, at present scattered and 
unconsidered, into a single and effective channel. 
Nay, the mere interest of the money which we 
are accustomed to keep dormant by us in the 
form of plate and jewellery, would alone be 
enough to sustain a school of magnificent 
architecture. And although, in highly wrought 
plate, and in finely designed jewellery, noble 
art may occasionally exist, yet in general both 
jewels and services of silver are matters of 
ostentation, much more than sources of intel- 
lectual pleasure. There are also many evils 
connected with them — they are a care to their 
possessors, a temptation to the dishonest, 
and a trouble and bitterness to the poor. 
So that I cannot but think that part of the 
wealth which now lies buried in these doubt- 
ful luxuries, might most wisely and kindly 
be thrown into a form which would give 
perpetual pleasure, not to its possessor only, 



Plate XII. 




Fig. 19. 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 93 

but to thousands besides, and neither tempt 
the unprincipled, nor inflame the envious, nor 
mortify the poor; while, supposing that your 
own dignity was dear to you, this, you may 
rely upon it, would be more impressed upon 
others by the nobleness of your house-walls 
than by the glistening of your sideboards. 

52. And even supposing that some ad- 
ditional expenditure were required for this 
purpose, are we indeed so much poorer than 
our ancestors, that we cannot now, in all the 
power of Britain, afford to do what was done 
by every small republic, by every independent 
city, in the middle ages, throughout France, 
Italy, and Germany ? I am not aware of a 
vestige of domestic architecture, belonging to 
the great mediaeval periods, which, according 
to its material and character, is not richly 
decorated. But look here {fig. 19), look to 
what an extent decoration has been carried 
in the domestic edifices of a city, I suppose 
not much superior in importance, commer- 
cially speaking, to Manchester, Liverpool, or 
Birmingham— -namely, Rouen, in Normandy. 
This is a garret window, still existing there, 
— a garret window built by William de 



94 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

Bourgtheroude in the early part of the sixteenth 
century. I show it you, first, as a proof of 
what may be made of the features of domestic 
buildings we are apt to disdain ; and secondly, 
as another example of a beautiful use of the 
pointed arch, filled by the solid shield of 
stone, and enclosing a square casement. It is 
indeed a peculiarly rich and beautiful instance, 
but it is a type of which many examples still 
exist in France, and of which many once 
existed in your own Scotland, of ruder work 
indeed, but admirable always in the effect upon 
the outline of the building.* 

53. I do not, however, hope that you will 
often be able to go as far as this in decoration ; 
in fact I would rather recommend a simpler 
style to you, founded on earlier examples; 
but, if possible, aided by colour, introduced 
in various kinds of naturally coloured stones. 
I have observed that your Scottish lapidaries 
have admirable taste and skill in the disposition 

* One of the most beautiful instances I know of this kind 
of window is in the ancient house of the Maxwells, on the 
estate of Sir John Maxwell of Polloc. I had not seen it 
when I gave this lecture, or I should have preferred it, as 
an example, to that of Rouen, with reference to modern 
possibilities of imitation. 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 95 

of the pebbles of your brooches and other 
ornaments of dress ; and I have not the least 
doubt that , the genius of your country would, 
if directed to this particular style of archi- 
tecture, produce works as beautiful as they 
would be thoroughly national. The Gothic 
of Florence, which owes at least the half of 
its beauty to the art of inlaying, would furnish 
you with exquisite examples ; its sculpture is 
indeed the most perfect which was ever pro- 
duced by the Gothic schools ; but, besides this 
rich sculpture, all its flat surfaces are inlaid 
with coloured stones, much being done with 
a green serpentine, which forms the greater 
part of the coast of Genoa. You have, I be- 
lieve, large beds of this rock in Scotland, and 
other stones besides, peculiarly Scottish, calcu- 
lated to form as noble a school of colour as 
ever existed.* 

54. And, now, I have but two things more 
to say to you in conclusion. 

Most of the lecturers whom you allow to 

* A series of four examples of designs for windows was 
exhibited at this point of the lecture, but I have not en- 
graved them, as they were hastily made for the purposes of 
momentary illustration, and are not such as I choose to 
publish or perpetuate. 



g6 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

address you, lay before you views of the 
sciences they profess, which are either gene- 
rally received, or incontrovertible. I come 
before you at a disadvantage ; for I cannot 
conscientiously tell you anything about archi- 
tecture but what is at variance with all com- 
monly received views upon the subject. I come 
before you, professedly to speak of things for- 
gotten or things disputed ; and I lay before 
you, not accepted principles, but questions at 
issue. Of those questions you are to be the 
judges, and to you I appeal. You must not, 
when you leave this room, if you feel doubtful 
of the truth of what I have said, refer your- 
selves to some architect of established repu- 
tation, and ask him whether I am right or not. 
You might as well, had you lived in the six- 
teenth century, have asked a Roman Catholic 
archbishop his opinion of the first reformer. I 
deny his jurisdiction ; I refuse his decision. I 
call upon you to be Bereans in architecture, as 
you are in religion, and to search into these 
things for yourselves. Remember that, how- 
ever candid a man may be, it is too much to 
expect of him, when his career in life has been 
successful, to turn suddenly on the highway, 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 97 

and to declare that all he has learned has 
been false, and all he has done, worthless; 
yet nothing less than such a declaration as 
this must be made by nearly every existing 
architect, before he admitted the truth of one 
word that I have said to you this evening. 
You must be prepared, therefore, to hear 
my opinions attacked with all the virulence 
of established interest, and all the pertinacity 
of confirmed prejudice; you will hear them 
made the subjects of every species of satire 
and invective ; but one kind of opposition to 
them you will never hear ; you will never hear 
them met by quiet, steady, rational argument ; 
for that is the one way in which they cannot 
be met. You will constantly hear me accused 
— you yourselves may be the first to accuse 
me — of presumption in speaking thus confi- 
dently against the established authority of ages. 
Presumption ! Yes, if I had spoken on my 
own authority; but I have appealed to two 
incontrovertible and irrefragable witnesses — to 
the nature that is around you — to the reason 
that is within you. And if you are willing 
in this matter to take the voice of authority 

against that of nature and of reason, take 

G 



98 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

it in other things also. Take it in religion, 
as you do in architecture. It is not by a 
Scottish audience— not by the descendants of 
the Reformer and the Covenanter — that I 
expected to be met with a refusal to believe 
that the world might possibly have been wrong 
for three hundred years, in their ways of carv- 
ing stones and setting up of pillars, when they 
know that they were wrong for twelve hun- 
dred years, in their marking how the roads 
divided, that led to Hell and Heaven. 

55. You must expect at first that there will 
be difficulties and inconsistencies in carrying 
out the new style ; but they will soon be con- 
quered if you attempt not too much at once. 
Do not be afraid of incongruities— do not think 
of unities of effect. Introduce your Gothic 
line by line and stone by stone ; never mind 
mixing it with your present architecture ; your 
existing houses will be none the worse for 
having little bits of better work fitted to them ; 
build a porch, or point a window, if you can 
do nothing else ; and remember that it is the 
glory of Gothic architecture that it can do 
anything,. Whatever you really and seriously 
want, Gothic will do for you; but it must be 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 99 

an earnest want. It is its pride to accommo- 
date itself to your needs ; and the one general 
law under which it acts is simply this, — find 
out what will make you comfortable, build that 
in the strongest and boldest way, and then set 
your fancy free in the decoration of it. Don't 
do anything to imitate this cathedral or that, 
however beautiful. Do what is convenient ; 
and if the form be a new one, so much the 
better ; then set your mason's wits to work, to 
find out some new way of treating it. Only be 
steadily determined that, even if you cannot 
get the best Gothic, at least you will have no 
Greek ; and in a few years' time— in less time 
than you could learn a new science or a new 
language thoroughly — the whole art of your 
native country will be reanimated. 

56. And, now, lastly. When this shall be 
accomplished, do not think it will make little 
difference to you, and that you will be little 
the happier, or little the better for it. You 
have at present no conception, and can have 
none, how much you would enjoy a truly 
beautiful architecture; but I can give you a 
proof of it which none of you will be able 
to deny. You will all assuredly admit this 



>FC. 



100 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

principle, — that whatever temporal things are 
spoken of in the Bible as emblems of the 
highest spiritual blessings, must be good things 
in themselves. You would allow that bread, 
for instance, would not have been used as an 
emblem of the word of life, unless it had been 
good, and necessary for man ; nor water used 
as the emblem of sanctification, unless it also 
had been good and necessary for man. You 
will allow that oil, and honey, and balm are 
good, when David says, " Let the righteous 
reprove me ; it shall be an excellent oil ; " or, 
" How sweet are thy words unto my taste ; 
yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth ; " or, 
when Jeremiah cries out in his weeping, " Is 
there no balm in Gilead ? is there no physician 
there?" You would admit at once that the 
man who said there was no taste in the literal 
honey, and no healing in the literal balm, must 
be of distorted judgment, since God had used 
them as emblems of spiritual sweetness and 
healing. And how, then, will you evade the 
conclusion, that there must be joy, and com- 
fort, and instruction in the literal beauty of 
architecture, when God, descending in His 
utmost love to the distressed Jerusalem, and 



II. ARCHITECTURE. 10 1 

addressing to her His most precious and solemn 
promises, speaks to her in such words as 
these: "Oh, thou afflicted, tossed with tem- 
pest, and not comforted," — What shall be done 
to her? — What brightest emblem of blessing 
will God set before her ? " Behold, I will lay 
thy stones with fair colours, and thy founda- 
tions with sapphires ; and I will make thy 
windows of agates ', and thy gates of carbuncles, 
and all thy borders of pleasant stones." Nor 
is this merely an emblem of spiritual blessing ; 
for that blessing is added in the concluding 
words, "And all thy children shall be taught 
of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of 
thy children." 



ADDENDA 

TO 

LECTURES I. AND II. 

57. The delivery of the foregoing lectures 
excited, as it may be imagined, considerable 
indignation among the architects who hap- 
pened to hear them, and elicited various at- 
tempts at reply. As it seemed to have been 
expected by the writers of these replies, that 
in two lectures, each of them lasting not much 
more than an hour, I should have been able 
completely to discuss the philosophy and his- 
tory of the architecture of the world, besides 
meeting every objection, and reconciling every 
apparent contradiction, which might suggest 
itself to the minds of hearers with whom, 
probably, from first to last, I had not a single 
exactly correspondent idea relating to the 
matters under discussion, it seems unnecessary 
to notice any of them in particular. But as 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. IO3 

this volume may perhaps fall into the hands 
of readers who have not time to refer to the 
works in which my views have been expressed 
more at large, and as I shall now not be able 
to write or to say anything more about archi- 
tecture for some time to come, it may be useful 
to state here, and explain in the shortest 
possible compass, the main gist of the proposi- 
tions which I desire to maintain respecting 
that art ; and also to note and answer, once 
for all, such arguments as are ordinarily used 
by the architects of the modern school to 
controvert these propositions. They may be 
reduced under six heads. 

1. That Gothic or Romanesque construction 
is nobler than Greek construction. 

2. That ornamentation is the principal part 
of architecture. 

3. That ornamentation should be visible. 

4. That ornamentation should be natural. 

5. That ornamentation should be thoughtful. 

6. And that therefore Gothic ornamentation 
is nobler than Greek ornamentation, and Gothic 
architecture the only architecture which should 
now be built. 

58. Proposition ist. — Gothic or Romanesque 



104 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

construction is nobler than Greek construction.* 
That is to say, building an arch, vault, or 
dome, is a nobler and more ingenious work 
than laying a flat stone or beam over the 
space to be covered. It is, for instance, a 
nobler and more ingenious thing to build an 
arched bridge over a stream, than to lay two 
pine-trunks across from bank to bank; and, 
in like manner, it is a nobler and more in- 
genious thing to build an arch over a window, 
door, or room, than to lay a single flat stone 
over the same space. 

No architects have ever attempted seriously 

* The constructive value of Gothic architecture is, how- 
ever, far greater than that of Romanesque, as the pointed 
arch is not only susceptible of an infinite variety of forms 
and applications to the weight to be sustained, but it 
possesses, in the outline given to its masonry at its perfect 
periods, the means of self-sustainment to a far greater degree 
than the round arch. I pointed out, for, I believe, the first 
time, the meaning and constructive value of the Gothic 
cusp, in page 129 of the first volume of the " Stones of 
Venice." That statement was first denied, and then taken 
advantage of, by modern architects; and considering how 
often it has been alleged that I have no practical knowledge 
of architecture, it cannot but be matter of some triumph to 
me, to find "The Builder," of the 21st January 1854, de- 
scribing as a new invention, the successful application to a 
church in Carlow of the principle which I laid down in the 
year 1851. 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. IO5 

to controvert this, proposition. Sometimes, 
however, they say that " of two ways of doing 
a thing, the best and most perfect is not 
always to be adopted, for there may be par- 
ticular reasons for employing an inferior one." 
This I am perfectly ready to grant, only let 
them show their reasons in each particular 
case. Sometimes also they say, that there is 
a charm in the simple construction which is 
lost in the scientific one. This I am also per- 
fectly ready to grant. There is a charm in 
Stonehenge which there is not in Amiens 
Cathedral, and a charm in an Alpine pine 
bridge which there is not in the Ponte della 
Trinita at Florence, and, in general, a charm 
in savageness which there is not in science. 
But do not let it be said, therefore, that savage- 
ness is science. 

59. Proposition 2nd. — Ornamentation is the 
principal part of architecture. That is to say, 
the highest nobility of a building does not 
consist in its being well built, but in its being 
nobly sculptured or painted. 

This is always, and at the first hearing of 
it, very naturally, considered one of my most 
heretical propositions. It is also one of the 



106 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

most important I have to maintain; and it 
must be permitted me to explain it at some 
length. The first thing to be required of a 
building — not, observe, the highest thing, but 
the first thing — is that it shall answer its 
purposes completely, permanently, and at the 
smallest expense. If it is a house, it should 
be just of the size convenient for its owner, 
containing exactly the kind and number of 
rooms that he wants, with exactly the number 
of windows he wants, put in the places that 
he wants. If it is a church, it should be just 
large enough for its congregation, and of such 
shape and disposition as shall make them 
comfortable in it and let them hear well in it. 
If it be a public office, it should be so disposed 
as is most convenient for the clerks in their 
daily avocations ; and so on ; all this being 
utterly irrespective of external appearance or 
aesthetic considerations of any kind, and all 
being done solidly, securely, and at the smallest 
necessary cost. 

The sacrifice of any of these first require- 
ments to external appearance is a futility and 
absurdity. Rooms must not be darkened to 
make the ranges of windows symmetrical. 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. IO7 

Useless wings must not be added on one side, 
to balance useful wings on the other, but the 
house built with one wing, if the owner has no 
need of two ; and so on. 

60. But observe, in doing all this, there is 
no High, or as it is commonly called, Fine 
Art, required at all. There may be much 
science, together with the lower form of art, 
or "handicraft," but there is as yet no Fine 
Art. House-building, on these terms, is no 
higher thing than ship-building. It indeed 
will generally be found that the edifice de- 
signed with this masculine reference to utility, 
will have a charm about it, otherwise unattain- 
able, just as a ship, constructed with simple 
reference to its service against powers of wind 
and wave, turns out one of the loveliest things 
that human hands produce. Still, we do not, 
and properly do not, hold ship-building to be 
a fine art, nor preserve in our memories the 
names of immortal ship-builders; neither, so 
long as the mere utility and constructive merit 
of the building are regarded, is architecture to 
be held a fine art, or are the names of archi- 
tects to be remembered immortally. For any 
one may at any time be taught to build the 



108 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

ship, or (thus far) the house, and there is 
nothing deserving of immortality in doing what 
any one may be taught to do. 

But when the house, or church, or other 
building is thus far designed, and the forms of 
its dead walls and dead roofs are up to this 
point determined, comes the divine part of the 
work — namely, to turn these dead walls into 
living ones. Only Deity, that is to say, those 
who are taught by Deity, can do that. 

And that is to be done by painting and 
sculpture, that is to say, by ornamentation. 
Ornamentation is therefore the principal part 
of architecture, considered as a subject of fine 
art. 

61. Now observe. It will at once follow 
from this principle, that a great architect must 
be a great sculptor or painter. 

This is a universal law. No person who is 
not a great sculptor or painter can be an 
architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, 
he can only be a builder. 

The three greatest architects hitherto known 
in the world were Phidias, Giotto, and Michael 
Angelo; with all of whom, architecture was 
only their play, sculpture and painting their 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. IO9 

work. All great works of architecture in ex- 
istence are either the work of single sculp- 
tors or painters, or of societies of sculptors and 
painters, acting collectively for a series of years. 
A Gothic cathedral is properly to be defined 
as a piece of the most magnificent associative 
sculpture, arranged on the noblest principles of 
building, for the service and delight of multi- 
tudes ; and the proper definition of architecture, 
as distinguished from sculpture, is merely " the 
art of designing sculpture for a particular place, 
and placing it there on the best principles of 
building." 

Hence it clearly follows, that in modern 
days we have no architects. The term " archi- 
tecture " is not so much as understood by us. 
I am very sorry to be compelled to the dis- 
courtesy of stating this fact, but a fact it is, 
and a fact which it is necessary to state 
strongly. 

Hence also it will follow, that the first thing 
necessary to the possession of a school of 
architecture is the formation of a school of 
able sculptors, and that till we have that, 
nothing we do can be called architecture at all. 

62. This, then, being my second proposition, 



I IO ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

the so-called "architects" of the day, as the 
reader will imagine, are not willing to admit 
it, or to admit any statement which at all 
involves it; and every statement, tending in 
this direction, which I have hitherto made, 
has of course been met by eager opposition; 
opposition which perhaps would have been 
still more energetic, but that architects have 
not, I think, till lately, been quite aware of 
the lengths to which I was prepared to carry 
the principle. 

The arguments, or assertions, which they 
generally employ against this second proposi- 
tion and its consequences, are the following : 

First. That the true nobility of architecture 
consists, not in decoration (or sculpture), but 
in the f< disposition of masses," and that archi- 
tecture is, in fact, the " art of proportion." 

63. It is difficult to overstate the enormity 
of the ignorance which this popular statement 
implies. For the fact is, that all art, and all 
nature, depend on the " disposition of masses." 
Painting, sculpture, music, and poetry depend 
all equally on the " proportion," whether of 
colours, stones, notes, or words. Proportion 
is a principle, not of architecture, but of 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. Ill 

existence. It is by the laws of proportion that 
stars shine, that mountains stand, and rivers 
flow. Man can hardly perform any act of his 
life, can hardly utter two words of innocent 
speech, or move his hand in accordance with 
those words, without involving some reference, 
whether taught or instinctive, to the laws of 
proportion. And in the fine arts, it is impos- 
sible to move a single step, or to execute 
the smallest and simplest piece of work, with- 
out involving all those laws of proportion in 
their full complexity. To arrange (by inven- 
tion) the folds of a piece of drapery, or dis- 
pose the locks of hair on the head of a statue, 
requires as much sense and knowledge of the 
laws of proportion, as to dispose the masses of 
a cathedral. The one are indeed smaller than 
the other, but the relations between I, 2, 4, 
and 8, are precisely the same as the relations 
between 6, 12, 24, and 48. So that the asser- 
tion that " architecture is par excellence the art 
of proportion," could never be made except by 
persons who know nothing of art in general ; 
and, in fact, never is made except by those 
architects, who, not being artists, fancy that 
the one poor aesthetic principle of which they 



112 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

are cognizant is the whole of art. They find 
that the " disposition of masses " is the only 
thing of importance in the art with which they 
are acquainted, and fancy therefore that it is 
peculiar to that art ; whereas the fact is, that 
all great art begins exactly where theirs ends, 
with the " disposition of masses." The asser- 
tion that Greek architecture, as opposed to 
Gothic architecture, is the " architecture of 
proportion," is another of the results of the 
same broad ignorance. First, it is a calumny 
of the old Greek style itself, which, like every 
other good architecture that ever existed, de- 
pends more on its grand figure sculpture, than 
on its proportions of parts; so that to copy 
the form of the Parthenon without its friezes 
and frontal statuary, is like copying the figure 
of a human being without its eyes and mouth ; 
and, in the second place, so far as modern 
pseudo-Greek work does depend on its propor- 
tions more than Gothic work, it does so, not 
because it is better proportioned, but because 
it has nothing but proportion to depend upon. 
Gesture is in like manner of more importance 
to a pantomime actor than to a tragedian, 
not because his gesture is more refined, but 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. I 1 3 

because he has no tongue. And the propor- 
tions of our common Greek work are important 
to it undoubtedly, but not because they are or 
ever can be more subtile than Gothic propor- 
tion, but because that work has no sculpture, 
nor colour, nor imagination, nor sacredness, nor 
any other quality whatsoever in it, but ratios of 
measures. And it is difficult to express with 
sufficient force the absurdity of the supposition 
that there is more room for refinements of pro- 
portion in the relations of seven or eight equal 
pillars, with the triangular end of a roof above 
them, than between the shafts, and buttresses, 
and porches, and pinnacles, and vaultings, and 
towers, and all other doubly and trebly multi- 
plied magnificences of membership which form 
the framework of a Gothic temple. 

64. Second reply.— It is often said, with 
some appearance of plausibility, that I dwell 
in all my writings on little things and con- 
temptible details; and not on essential and 
large things. Now, in the first place, as soon 
as our architects become capable of doing and 
managing little and contemptible things, it will 
be time to talk about larger ones ; at present 
I do not see that they can design so much as 

H 



114 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

a niche or a bracket, and therefore they need 
not as yet think about anything larger. For 
although, as both just now, and always, I have 
said, there is as much science of arrangement 
needed in the designing of a small group of 
parts as of a large one, yet assuredly designing 
the larger one is not the easier work of the two. 
For the eye and mind can embrace the smaller 
object more completely, and if the powers of 
conception are feeble, they get embarrassed 
by the inferior members which fall within the 
divisions of the larger design.* So that, of 
course, the best way is to begin with the 
smaller features; for most assuredly, those 
who cannot design small things cannot design 
large ones ; and yet, on the other hand, 
whoever can design small things perfectly, 
can design whatever he chooses. The man 
who, without copying, and by his own true 
and original power, can arrange a cluster of 



* Thus, in speaking of Pugin's designs, I said, "Expect 
no cathedrals of him ; but no one, at present, can design 
a better finial, though he will never design even a finial 
perfectly." But even this I said less with reference to 
powers of arrangement, than to materials of fancy ; for many 
men have store enough to last them through a boss or a 
bracket, but not to last them through a church front. 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. I 1 5 

rose-leaves nobly, can design anything. He 
may fail from want of taste or feeling, but not 
from want of power. 

And the real reason why architects are so 
eager in protesting against my close examina- 
tion of details, is simply that they know they 
dare not meet me on that ground. Being, as I 
have said, in reality not architects, but buil- 
ders, they can indeed raise a large building, 
with copied ornaments, which, being huge and 
white, they hope the public may pronounce 
" handsome." But they cannot design a clus- 
ter of oak-leaves — no, nor a single human 
figure- — no, nor so much as a beast, or a bird, 
or a bird's nest ! Let them first learn to in- 
vent as much as will fill a quatrefoil, or point 
a pinnacle, and then it will be time enough 
to reason with them on the principles of the 
sublime. 

65/ But farther. The things that I have 
dwelt upon in examining buildings, though 
often their least parts, are always in reality 
their principal parts. That is the principal 
part of a building in which its mind is con- 
tained, and that, as I have just shown, is its 
sculpture and painting. I do with a building 



Il6 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

as I do with a man, watch the eye and the lips: 
when they are bright and eloquent, the form of 
the body is of little consequence. 

Whatever other objections have been made 
to this second proposition, arise, as far as I 
remember, merely from a confusion of the idea 
of essentialness or primariness with the idea 
of nobleness. The essential thing in a build- 
ing, — its first virtue, — is that it be strongly 
built) and fit for its uses. The noblest thing 
in a building, and its highest virtue, is that it 
be nobly sculptured or painted.* 

66. One or two important corollaries yet 
remain to be stated. It has just been said 
that to sacrifice the convenience of a building 
to its external appearance is a futility and 
absurdity, and that convenience and stability 
are to be attained at the smallest cost. But 
when that convenience has been attained, the 
adding the noble characters of life by painting 
and sculpture, is a work in which all possible 
cost may be wisely admitted. There is great 
difficulty in fully explaining the various bear- 
ings of this proposition, so as to do away with 

* Of course I use the term painting as including every 
mode of applying colour. 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. II7 

the chances of its being erroneously understood 
and applied. For although, in the first design- 
ing of the building, nothing is to be admitted 
but what is wanted, and no useless wings 
are to be added to balance useful ones, yet in 
its ultimate designing, when its sculpture and 
colour become precious, it may be that actual 
room is wanted to display them, or richer sym- 
metry wanted to deserve them; and in such 
cases even a useless wall may be built to bear 
the sculpture, as at San Michele of Lucca, 
or a useless portion added to complete the 
cadences, as at St. Mark's of Venice, or use- 
less height admitted in order to increase the 
impressiveness, as in nearly every noble build- 
ing in the world. But the right to do this 
is dependent upon the actual purpose- of the 
building becoming no longer one of utility 
merely; as the purpose of a cathedral is not 
so much to shelter the congregation as to awe 
them. In such cases even some sacrifice of 
convenience may occasionally be admitted r as 
in the case of certain forms of pillared churches* 
But for the most part, the great law is, con- 
venience first, and then the noblest decoration 
possible ; and this is peculiarly the case in 



Il8 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

domestic buildings, and such public ones as 
are constantly to be used for practical puiv 
poses. 

6j. Proposition 3rd.—- Ornamentation should 
be visible. . 

The reader may imagine this to be an indis- 
putable position ; but, practically, it is one of 
the last which modern architects are likely to 
admit ; for it involves much more than appears 
at first sight. To render ornamentation, with 
all its qualities, clearly and entirely visible in 
its appointed place on the building, requires 
a knowledge of effect and a power of design 
which few even of the best artists possess, and 
which modern architects, so far from possess- 
ing, do not so much as comprehend the exist- 
ence of. But, without dwelling on this highest 
manner of rendering ornament "visible," I 
desire only at present to convince the reader 
thoroughly of the main fact asserted in the 
text, that while modern builders decorate the 
tops of buildings, mediaeval builders decorated 
the bottom. So singular is the ignorance yet 
prevailing of the first principles of Gothic 
architecture, that I saw this assertion marked 
with notes of interrogation in several of the 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. I 1 9 

reports of these Lectures; although, at Edin- 
burgh, it was only necessary for those who 
doubted it to have walked to Holyrood Chapel, 
in order to convince themselves of the truth 
of it, so far as their own city was concerned ; 
and although, most assuredly, the cathedrals 
of Europe have now been drawn often enough 
to establish the very simple fact that their best 
sculpture is in their porches, not in their 
steeples. However, as this great Gothic prin- 
ciple seems yet unacknowledged, let me state 
it here, once for all, namely, that the whole 
building is decorated, in all pure and fine ex- 
amples, with the most exactly studied respect 
to the powers of the eye ; the richest and most 
delicate sculpture being put on the walls of the 
porches, or on the fagade of the building, just 
high enough above the ground to secure it 
from accidental (not from wanton*) injury. 
The decoration, as it rises, becomes always 
bolder, and in the buildings of the. greatest 

* Nothing is more notable in good Gothic than the con- 
fidence of its builders in the respect of the people for their 
work. A great school of architecture cannot exist when this 
respect cannot be calculated upon, as it would be vain to put 
fine sculpture within the reach of a population whose only 
pleasure would be in defacing it. 



120 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

times, generally simpler. Thus at San Zeno 
and the duomo of Verona, the only delicate 
decorations are on the porches and lower walls 
of the facades, the rest of the buildings being 
left comparatively plain; in the ducal palace 
of Venice the only very careful work is in the 
lowest capitals; and so also the richness of 
the work diminishes upwards in the transepts 
of Rouen, and facades of Bayeux, Rheims, 
Amiens, Abbeville,* Lyons, and Notre Dame 
of Paris. But in the middle and later Gothic 
the tendency is to produce an equal richness 
of effect over the whole building, or even to 
increase the richness towards the top; but 
this is done so skilfully that no fine work is 
wasted ; and when the spectator ascends to 
the higher points of the building, which he 
thought were of the most consummate delicacy, 
he finds them Herculean in strength and rough- 
hewn in style, the really delicate work being 
all put at the base. The general treatment of 
Romanesque work is to increase the number 
of arches at the top, which at once enriches 

* The church at Abbeville is late flamboyant, but well 
deserves, for the exquisite beauty of its porches, to be named 
even with the great works of the thirteenth century. 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. 121 

and lightens the mass, and to put the finest 
sculpture of the arches at the bottom. In 
towers of all kinds and periods the effec- 
tive enrichment is towards the top, and most 
rightly, since their dignity is in their height; 
but they are never made the recipients of fine 
sculpture, with, as far as I know, the single 
exception of Giotto's campanile, which indeed 
has fine sculpture, but it is at the bottom. 

The facade of Wells Cathedral seems to be 
an exception to the general rule, in having its 
principal decoration at the top ; but it is on a 
scale of perfect power and effectiveness ; while 
in the base modern Gothic of Milan Cathedral 
the statues are cut delicately everywhere, and 
the builders think it a merit that the visitor 
must climb to the roof before he can see them ; 
and our modern Greek and Italian architecture 
reaches the utmost pitch of absurdity by plac- 
ing its fine work at the top only. So that the 
general condition of the thing may be stated 
boldly, as in the text ; the principal ornaments 
of Gothic buildings being in their porches, and 
of modern buildings, in their parapets. 

68. Proposition 4th. — Ornamentation should 
be natural, — that is to say, should in some 



122 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

degree express or adopt the beauty of natural 
objects. This law, together with its ultimate 
reason, is expressed in the statement given in 
the "Stones of Venice," vol. i. p. 213: "All 
noble ornament is the expression of man's 
delight in God's work." 

Observe, it does not hence follow that it 
should be an exact imitation of, or endeavour 
in anywise to supersede, God's work. It may 
consist only in a partial adoption of, and 
compliance with, the usual forms of natural 
things, without at all going to the point of 
imitation ; and it is possible that the point of 
imitation may be closely reached by ornaments, 
which nevertheless are entirely unfit for their 
place, and are the signs only of a degraded 
ambition and an ignorant dexterity. Bad 
decorators err as easily on the side of imitating 
nature, as of forgetting her ; and the question 
of the exact degree in which imitation should 
be attempted under given circumstances, is one 
of the most subtle and difficult in the whole 
range of criticism. I have elsewhere examined 
it at some length, and have yet much to say 
about it; but here I can only state briefly 
that the modes in which ornamentation ought 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. 1 23 

to fall short of pure representation or imitation 
are in the main three, namely : — 

A. Conventionalism by cause of colour. 

B. Conventionalism by cause of inferiority. 

C. Conventionalism by cause of means. 

69. A. Conventionalism by cause of colour. 
- — Abstract colour is not an imitation of nature, 
but is nature itself; that is to say, the pleasure 
taken in blue or red, as such, considered as 
hues merely, is the same, so long as the 
brilliancy of the hue is equal, whether it be 
produced by the chemistry of man, or the 
chemistry of flowers, or the chemistry of skies. 
We deal with colour as with sound- — so far 
ruling the power of the light, as we rule the 
power of the air, producing beauty not 
necessarily imitative, but sufficient in itself, so 
that, wherever colour is introduced, ornamenta- 
tion may cease to represent natural objects, 
and may consist in mere spots, or bands, or 
flamings, or any other condition of arrange- 
ment favourable to the colour. 

70. B. Conventionalism by cause of in- 
feriority.— In general, ornamentation is set 
upon certain services, subjected to certain 
systems, and confined within certain limits; 



124 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

so that its forms require to be lowered or 
limited in accordance with the required rela- 
tions. It cannot be allowed to assume the 
free outlines, or to rise to the perfection of 
imitation. Whole banks of flowers, for in- 
stance, cannot be carved on cathedral fronts, 
but only narrow mouldings, having some of the 
characters of banks of flowers. Also, some 
ornaments require to be subdued in value, 
that they may not interfere with the effect 
of others; and all these necessary inferi- 
orities are attained by means of departing 
from natural forms — it being an established 
law of human admiration that what is most 
representative of nature shall, cceteris paribus, 
be most attractive. 

All the various kinds of ornamentation, con- 
sisting of spots, points, twisted bands, abstract 
curves, and other such, owe their peculiar 
character to this conventionalism " by cause of 
inferiority." 

71. C. Conventionalism by cause of means. 
— In every branch of art, only so much imita- 
tion of nature is to be admitted as is consistent 
with the ease of the workman and the capacities 
of the material. Whatever shortcomings are 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. 125 

appointed (for they are more than permitted, 
they are in such cases appointed, and meri- 
torious) on account of the untractableness of 
the material, come under the head of " con- 
ventionalism by cause of means." 

These conventionalities, then, being duly 
understood and accepted, in modification of 
the general law, that law will be, that the 
glory of all ornamentation consists in the 
adoption or imitation of the beauties of natural 
objects, and that no work can be of high value 
which is not full of this beauty. To this 
fourth proposition, modern architects have not 
ventured to make any serious resistance. On 
the contrary, they seem to be, little by little, 
gliding into an obscure perception of the fact, 
that architecture, in most periods of the world, 
had sculpture upon it, and that the said sculp- 
ture generally did represent something in- 
telligible. For instance, we find Mr. Huggins, 
of Liverpool, lately lecturing upon architecture 
"in its relations to nature and the intellect,"* 
and gravely informing his hearers, that "in 
the Middle Ages angels were human figures;" 
that " some of the richest ornaments of 

* See " The Builder," for January I2~ 1854. 



126 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING, 

Solomon's temple were imitated from the palm 
and pomegranate," and that "the Greeks fol- 
lowed the example of the Egyptians in select- 
ing their ornaments from the plants of their 
own country." It is to be presumed that 
the lecturer has never been in the Elgin or 
Egyptian room of the British Museum, or it 
might have occurred to him that the Egyptians 
and Greeks sometimes also selected their orna- 
ments from the men of their own country. 
But we must not expect too much illumination 
at once; and as we are told that, in conclusion, 
Mr. Huggins glanced at "the error of archi- 
tects in neglecting the fountain of wisdom thus 
open to them in nature," we may expect in 
due time large results from the discovery of 
a source of wisdom so unimagined. 

72. Proposition 5th. — Ornamentation should 
be thoughtful. That is to say, whenever you 
put a chisel or a pencil into a man's hand 
for the purpose of enabling him to produce 
beauty, you are to expect of him that he will 
think about what he is doing, and feel some- 
thing about it, and that the expression of this 
thought or feeling will be the most noble 
quality in what he produces with his chisel 



ADDExNDA TO LECT. I. AND II. 1 27 

or brush, inasmuch as the power of thinking 
and feeling is the most noble thing in the 
man. It will hence follow that as men do 
not commonly think the same thoughts twice, 
yon are not to require of them that they shall 
do the same thing twice. You are to expect 
another and a different thought of them, as 
soon as one thought has been well expressed. 

73. Hence, therefore, it follows also that 
all noble ornamentation is perpetually varied 
ornamentation, and that the moment you find 
ornamentation unchanging, you may know that 
it is of a degraded kind or degraded school. 
To this law, the only exceptions arise out of 
the uses of monotony, as a contrast to change. 
Many subordinate architectural mouldings are 
severely alike in their various parts (though 
never unless they are thoroughly subordinate, 
for monotony is always deathful according to 
the degree of it), in order to set off change in 
others; and a certain monotony or similarity 
must be introduced among the most changeful 
ornaments in order to enhance and exhibit 
their own changes. 

The truth of this proposition is self-evident ; 
for no art can be noble which is incapable of 



128 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

expressing thought, and no art is capable of 
expressing thought which does not change. 
To require of an artist that he should always 
reproduce the same picture, would be not one 
whit more base than to require of a carver 
that he should always reproduce the same 
sculpture. 

The principle is perfectly clear and alto- 
gether incontrovertible. Apply it to modern 
Greek architecture, and that architecture must 
cease to exist; for it depends absolutely on 
copyism. 

74. The sixth proposition above stated, that 
Gothic ornamentation is nobler than Greek 
ornamentation , &c, is therefore sufficiently 
proved by the acceptance of this one principle, 
no less important than unassailable. Of all 
that I have to bring forward respecting archi- 
tecture, this is the one I have most at heart; 
for on the acceptance of this depends the 
determination whether the workman shall be 
a living, progressive, and happy human being, 
or whether he shall be a mere machine, with 
its valves smoothed by heart's blood instead of 
oil, — the most pitiable form of slave. 

And it is with especial reference to the 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. 129 

denial of this principle in modern and Renais- 
sance architecture, that I speak of that archi- 
tecture with a bitterness which appears to 
many readers extreme, while in reality, so far 
from exaggerating, I have not grasp enough 
of thought to embrace, the evils which have 
resulted among all the orders of European 
society from the introduction of the Renais- 
sance schools of building, in turning away 
the eyes of the beholder from natural beauty, 
and reducing the workman to the level of a 
machine. In the Gothic times, writing, paint- 
ing, carving, casting, — it mattered not what, — 
were all works done by thoughtful and happy 
men ; and the illumination of the volume, and 
the carving and casting of wall and gate, em- 
ployed, not thousands, but millions, of true 
and noble artists over all Christian lands. Men 
in the same position are now left utterly with- 
out intellectual power or pursuit, and, being 
unhappy in their work, they rebel against it : 
hence one of the worst forms of Unchristian 
Socialism. So again, there being now no 
nature or variety in architecture, the multi- 
tude are not interested in it; therefore, for 
the present, they have lost their taste for 



I30 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

art altogether, so that you can no longer trust 
sculpture within their reach. Consider the 
innumerable forms of evil involved in the 
temper and taste of the existing populace of 
London or Paris, as compared with the temper 
of the populace of Florence, when the quarter 
of Santa Maria Novella received its title of 
."Joyful Quarter," from the rejoicings of the 
multitude at getting a new picture into their 
church, better than the old ones; — all this 
difference being exclusively chargeable on the 
Renaissance architecture. And then, farther, 
if we remember, not only the revolutionary 
ravage of sacred architecture, but the immea- 
surably greater destruction effected by the 
Renaissance builders and their satellites, wher- 
ever they came, destruction so wide-spread 
that there is not a town in France or Italy 
but it has to deplore the deliberate overthrow 
of more than half its noblest monuments, in 
order to put up Greek porticoes or palaces 
in their stead; adding also all the blame of 
the ignorance of the meaner kind of men, 
operating in thousands of miserable abuses 
upon the frescoes, books, and pictures, as the 
architects' hammers did on the carved work, 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. I3I 

of the Middle Ages;* and, finally, if we ex- 
amine the influence which the luxury, and, 
still more, the heathenism, joined with the 
essential dulness of these schools, have had 
on the upper class of society, it will ultimately 
be found that no expressions are energetic 
enough to describe, nor broad enough to em- 
brace, the enormous moral evils which have 
risen from them. 

75. I omitted, in preparing the preceding 
lecture for the press, a passage referring to 
this subject, because it appeared to me, in its 
place, hardly explained by preceding state- 
ments. But I give it here unaltered, as being, 

* Nothing appears to me much more wonderful, than the 
remorseless way in which the educated ignorance, even of 
the present day, will Sweep away an ancient monument, if 
its preservation be not absolutely consistent with immediate 
convenience or economy. Putting aside all antiquarian con- 
siderations, and all artistical ones, I wish that people would 
only consider the steps and the weight of the following very 
simple argument. You allow it is wrong to waste time, that 
is, your own time ; but then it must be still more wrong to 
waste other people's ; for you have some right to your own 
time, but none to theirs. Well, then, if it is thus wrong to 
waste the time of the living, it must be still more wrong to 
waste the time of the dead ; for the living can redeem their 
time, the dead cannot. But you waste the best of the time 
of the dead when you destroy the works they have left you ; 
for to those works they gave the best of their time, intending 
them for immortality. 



132 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

in sober earnest, but too weak to characterise 
the tendencies of the " accursed " architecture 
of which it speaks. 

a Accursed, I call it, with deliberate purpose. 
It needed but the gathering up of a Babylonish 
garment to trouble Israel ; — these marble gar- 
ments of the ancient idols of the Gentiles, how 
many have they troubled ! Gathered out of 
their ruins by the second Babylon, — gathered 
by the Papal Church in the extremity of her 
sin;- — raised up by her, not when she was 
sending forth her champions to preach in the 
highway, and pine in the desert, and perish in 
the fire, but in the very scarlet fruitage and 
fulness of her guilt, when her priests vested 
themselves not with purple only, but with 
blood, and bade the cups of their feasting 
foam not with wine only, but with hemlock; 
— raised by the hands of the Leos and the 
Borgias, raised first into that mighty temple 
where the seven hills slope to the Tiber, that 
marks by its massy dome the central spot, 
where Rome has reversed the words of Christ, 
and, as He vivified the stone to the apostle- 
ship, she petrifies the apostleship into the 
stumbling stone; — exalted there first as if to 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. 1 33 

mark what work it had to do, it went forth to 
paralyse or to pollute, and wherever it came, 
the lustre faded from the streets of our cities, 
the grey towers and glorious arches of our 
abbeys fellby the river sides, the love of nature 
was uprooted from the hearts of men, base 
luxuries and cruel formalisms were festered 
and frozen into them from their youth ; and at 
last, where, from his fair Gothic chapel beside 
the Seine, the king St. Louis had gone forth, 
followed by his thousands in the cause of 
Christ, another king was dragged forth from 
the gates of his Renaissance palace,* to die, 
by the hands of the thousands of his people 

* The character of Renaissance architecture, and the spirit 
which dictated its adoption, may be remembered as having 
been centred and symbolised in the palace of Versailles ; 
whose site was chosen by Louis the Fourteenth, in order 
that from thence he might not see St. Denis, the burial-place 
of his family. The cost of the palace in twenty- seven years 
is stated in "The Builder," for March 18th, 1854, to have 
been ^3, 246,000 money of that period, equal to about seven 
millions now (^"900,000 having been expended in the year 
1686 alone). The building is thus notably illustrative of the 
two feelings which were stated in the "Stones of Venice," 
to be peculiarly characteristic of the Renaissance spirit, the 
Pride of State and Fear of Death. Compare the horror of 
Louis the Fourteenth at the sight of the tower of St. Denis, 
with the feeling which prompted the Scaligeri at Verona to 
set their tombs within fifteen feet of their palace walls. 



134 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

gathered in another crusade; or what shall 
that be called — whose sign was not the cross, 
but the guillotine ? " 

j6. I have not space here to pursue the 
subject farther, nor shall I be able to write 
anything more respecting architecture for some 
time to come. But in the meanwhile, I would 
most earnestly desire to leave with the reader 
this one subject of thought — " The Life of the 
Workman" For it is singular, and far more 
than singular, that among all the writers who 
have attempted to examine the principles stated 
in the " Stones of Venice," not one * has as yet 
made a single comment on what was precisely 
and accurately the most important chapter in 
the whole book ; namely, the description of the 
nature of Gothic architecture, as involving the 
liberty of the workman (vol. ii. ch. vi.). I had 
hoped that whatever might be the prejudices 
of modern architects, there would have been 
found some among them quicksighted enough 
to see the bearings of this principle, and gene- 
rous enough to support it. There has hitherto 
stood forward not one. 

* An article in F7-aser > s Magazine, which has appeared since 
these sheets were sent to press, forms a solitary exception. 



ADDENDA TO LECT. I. AND II. 1 35 

But my purpose must at last be accomplished 
for all this. The labourer among the grave- 
stones of our modern architecture must yet be 
raised up, and become a living soul. Before 
he can be thus raised, the whole system of 
Greek architecture, as practised in the pre- 
sent day, must be annihilated; but it will 
be annihilated, and that speedily. For truth 
and judgment are its declared opposites, and 
against these nothing ever finally prevailed, or 
shall prevail. 



LECTURE III. 

TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 

Delivered November 15, 1853. 

77. My object this evening is not so much to 
give you any account of the works or the genius 
of the great painter whom we have so lately 
lost (which it would require rather a year than 
an hour to do), as to give you some idea of 
the position which his works hold with respect 
to the landscape of other periods, and of the 
general condition and prospects of the land- 
scape art of the present day. I will not lose 
time in prefatory remarks, as I have little 
enough at any rate, but will enter abruptly 
on my subject. 

78. You are all of you well aware that land- 
scape seems hardly to have exercised any 
strong influence, as such, on any pagan nation 
or pagan artist. I have no time to enter into 

any details on this, of course, most intricate 

136 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 37 

and difficult subject ; but I will only ask you 
to observe, that wherever natural scenery is 
alluded to by the ancients, it is either agri- 
culturally, with the kind of feeling that a good 
Scotch farmer has; sensually, in the enjoy- 
ment of sun or shade, cool winds or sweet 
scents; fearfully, in a mere vulgar dread of 
rocks and desolate places, as compared with the 
comfort of cities ; or, finally, superstitiously, 
in the personification or deification of natural 
powers, generally with much degradation of 
their impressiveness, as in the paltry fables 
of Ulysses receiving the winds in bags from 
iEolus, and of the Cyclops hammering lightning 
sharp at the ends, on an anvil.* Of course, 
you will here and there find feeble evidences 
of a higher sensibility, chiefly, I think, in 
Plato, iEschylus, Aristophanes, and Virgil 
Homer, though in the epithets he applies to 

* Of course I do not mean by calling these fables " paltry," 
to dispute their neatness, ingenuity, or moral depth ; but 
only their want of apprehension of the extent and awfulness 
of the phenomena introduced. So also, in denying Homer's 
interest in nature, I do not mean to deny his accuracy of 
observation, or his power of seizing on the main points of 
landscape, but I deny the power of landscape over his heart, 
unless when closely associated with, and altogether subor- 
dinate to, some human interest. 



I38 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

landscape always thoroughly graphic, uses the 
same epithet for rocks, seas, and trees, from 
one end of his poem to the other, evidently 
without the smallest interest in anything of 
the kind ; and in the mass of heathen writers, 
the absence of sensation on these subjects 
is singularly painful. For instance, in that, 
to my mind, most disgusting of all so-called 
poems, the Journey to Brundusium, you re- 
member that Horace takes exactly as much 
interest in the scenery he is passing through 
as Sancho Panza would have done. 

79. You will find, on the other hand, that 
the language of the Bible is specifically dis- 
tinguished from all other early literature, by 
its delight in natural imagery; and that the 
dealings of God with His people are calculated 
peculiarly to awaken this sensibility within 
them. Out of the monotonous valley of Egypt 
they are instantly taken into the midst of the 
mightiest mountain scenery in the peninsula 
of Arabia; and that scenery is associated in 
their minds with the immediate manifesta- 
tion and presence of the Divine Power; so 
that mountains for ever afterwards become 
invested with a peculiar sacredness in their 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 39 

minds : while their descendants being placed 
in what was then one of the loveliest districts 
upon the earth, full of glorious vegetation, 
bounded on one side by the sea, on the north 
by " that goodly mountain n Lebanon, on the 
south and east by deserts, whose barrenness 
enhanced by their contrast the sense of the 
perfection of beauty in their own land, they 
became, by these means, and by the touch of 
God's own hand upon their hearts, sensible 
to the appeal of natural scenery in a way in 
which no other people were at the time. And 
their literature is full of expressions, not only 
testifying a vivid sense of the power of na- 
ture over man, but showing that sympathy 
with natural things themselves, as if they had 
human souls, which is the especial charac- 
teristic of true love of the works of God. 
I intended to have insisted on this sympathy 
at greater length, but I found, only two or 
three days ago, much of what I had to say 
to you anticipated in a little book, unpre- 
tending, but full of interest, "The Lamp and 
the Lantern," by Dr. James Hamilton ; and I 
will therefore only ask you to consider such 
expressions as that tender and glorious verse 



I4O ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

in Isaiah, speaking of the cedars on the moun- 
tains as rejoicing over the fall of the king of 
Assyria: "Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, 
and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, Since thou 
art gone down to the grave, no feller is come 
up against us." See what sympathy there 
is here, as if with the very hearts of the trees 
themselves. So also in the words of Christ, 
in His personification of the lilies: "They 
toil not, neither do they spin." Consider 
such expressions as, "The sea saw that, and 
fled. Jordan was driven back. The moun- 
tains skipped like rams; and the little hills 
like lambs." Try to find anything in pro- 
fane writing like this; and note farther that 
the whole book of Job appears to have been 
chiefly written and placed in the inspired 
volume in order to show the value of natural 
history, and its power on the human heart. 
I cannot pass by it without pointing out the 
evidences of the beauty of the country that 
Job inhabited.* Observe, first, it was an 
arable country. "The oxen were ploughing 
and the asses feeding beside them." It was 

* This passage, respecting the book of Job, was omitted 
in the delivery of the Lecture, for want of time. 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. I4I 

a pastoral country : his substance, besides 
camels and asses, was 7000 sheep. It was 
a mountain country, fed by streams descend- 
ing from the high snows. " My brethren 
have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the 
stream of brooks they pass away ; which are 
blackish by reason of the ice, and wherein 
the snow is hid : What time they wax warm 
they vanish : when it is hot they are consumed 
out of their place." Again : " If I wash my- 
self with snow water, and make my hands 
never so clean." Again : " Drought and heat 
consume the snow waters." It was a rocky 
country, with forests and verdure rooted in 
the rocks. " His branch shooteth forth in 
his garden ; his roots are wrapped about the 
heap, and seeth the place of stones." Again : 
"Thou shalt be in league with the stones 
of the field." It was a place visited, like 
the valleys of Switzerland, by convulsions 
and falls of mountains. " Surely the moun- 
tain falling cometh to nought, and the rock 
is removed out of his place. The waters wear 
the stones ; thou washest away the things 
which grow out of the dust of the earth." 
" He removeth the mountains and they know 



142 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

not : he overturneth them in his anger." 
" He putteth forth his hand upon the rock : 
he overturneth the mountains by the roots : 
he cutteth out rivers among the rocks." I 
have not time to go farther into this; but 
you see Job's country was one like your 
own, full of pleasant brooks and rivers, rush- 
ing among the rocks, and of all other sweet 
and noble elements of landscape. The magni- 
ficent allusions to natural scenery throughout 
the book are therefore calculated to touch the 
heart to the end of time. 

80. Then at the central point of Jewish 
prosperity, you have the first great naturalist 
the world ever saw, Solomon ; not permitted, 
indeed, to anticipate, in writing, the discoveries 
of modern times, but so gifted as to show us 
that heavenly wisdom is manifested as much 
in the knowledge of the hyssop that springeth 
out of the wall as in political and philosophical 
speculation. 

The books of the Old Testament, as dis- 
tinguished from all other early writings, are 
thus prepared for an everlasting influence over 
humanity; and, finally, Christ himself, setting 
the concluding example to the conduct and 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 43 

thoughts of men, spends nearly His whole life 
in the fields, the mountains, or the small 
country villages of Judea; and in the very 
closing scenes of His life, will not so much as 
sleep within the walls of Jerusalem, but rests 
at the little village of Bethphage, walking in 
the morning, and returning in the evening, 
through the peaceful avenues of the Mount of 
Olives, to and from His work of teaching in 
the temple. 

81. It would thus naturally follow, both from 
the general tone and teaching of the Scrip- 
tures, and from the example of our Lord him- 
self, that wherever Christianity was preached 
and accepted, there would be an immediate 
interest awakened in the works of God, as 
seen in the natural world : and, accordingly, 
this is the second universal and distinctive 
character of Christian art, as distinguished 
from all pagan work ; the first being a peculiar 
spirituality in its conception of the human 
form, preferring holiness of expression and 
strength of character, to beauty of features 
or of body ; and the second, as I say, its in- 
tense fondness for natural objects — animals, 
leaves, and flowers, — inducing an immediate 



144 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

transformation of the cold and lifeless pagan 
ornamentation into vivid imagery of nature. 
Of course this manifestation of feeling was 
at first checked by the circumstances under 
which the Christian religion was disseminated. 
The art of the first three centuries is entirely 
subordinate, — restrained partly by persecution, 
partly by a high spirituality, which cared much 
more about preaching than painting; and then 
when, under Constantine, Christianity became 
the religion of the Roman empire, myriads 
of persons gave the aid of their wealth and 
of their art to the new religion, who were 
Christians in nothing but the name, and who 
decorated a Christian temple just as they 
would have decorated a pagan one, merely 
because the new religion had become Imperial. 
Then, just as the new art was beginning to 
assume a distinctive form, down came the 
northern barbarians upon it; and all their 
superstitions had to be leavened with it, and 
all their hard hands and hearts softened by 
it, before their art could appear in anything 
like a characteristic form. The warfare in 
which Europe was perpetually plunged retarded 
this development for ages ; but it steadily and 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. I45 

gradually prevailed, working from the eighth to 
the eleventh century like a seed in the ground, 
showing little signs of life, but still, if care- 
fully examined, changing essentially every day 
and every hour : at last, in the twelfth century 
the blade appears above the black earth ; in 
the thirteenth, the plant is in full leaf. 

82. I begin, then, with the thirteenth century, 
and must now make to you a general assertion, 
which, if you will note down and examine at 
your leisure, you will find true and useful, 
though I have not time at present to give you 
full demonstration of it. 

I say, then, that the art of the thirteenth 
century is the foundation of all art — nor 
merely the foundation, but the root of it; that 
is to say, succeeding art is not merely built 
upon it, but was all comprehended in it, and 
is developed out of it. Passing this great 
century, we find three successive branches de- 
veloped from it, in each of the three following 
centuries. The fourteenth century is pre- 
eminently the age of Thonglit, the fifteenth 
the age of Drawing, and the sixteenth the 
age of Painting. 

83. Observe, first, the fourteenth century is 

K 



I46 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

pre-eminently the age of thought. It begins 
with the first words of the poem of Dante ; 
and all the great pictorial poems — the mighty 
series of works in which everything is done to 
relate, but nothing to imitate — belong to this 
century. I should only confuse you by giving 
you the names of marvellous artists, most of 
them little familiar to British ears, who adorned 
this century in Italy; but you will easily re- 
member it as the age of Dante and Giotto — 
the age of Thought. 

The men of the succeeding century (the 
fifteenth) felt that they could not rival their pre- 
decessors in invention, but might excel them in 
execution. Original thoughts belonging to this 
century are comparatively rare ; even Raphael 
and Michael Angelo themselves borrowed all 
their principal ideas and plans of pictures from 
their predecessors; but they executed them 
with a precision up to that time unseen. You 
must understand by the word " drawing," 
the perfect rendering of forms, whether in 
sculpture or painting ; and then remember 
the fifteenth century as the age of Leonardo, 
Michael Angelo, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Raphael 
—pre-eminently the age of Drawing. 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. I47 

The sixteenth century produced the four 
greatest Painters y that is to say, managers 
of colour, whom the world has seen ; namely, 
Tintoret, Paul Veronese, Titian, and Correggio. 
I need not say more to justify my calling it the 
age oi Painting. 

84. This, then, being the state of things re- 
specting art in general, let us next trace the 
career of landscape through these centuries. 

It was only towards the close of the thirteenth 
century that figure* painting began to assume so 
perfect a condition as to require some elaborate 
suggestion of landscape background. Up to 
that time, if any natural object had to be repre- 
sented, it was done in an entirely conventional 
way, as you see it upon Greek vases, or in 
a Chinese porcelain pattern; an independent 
tree or flower being set upon the white ground, 
or ground of any colour, wherever there was a 
vacant space for it, without the smallest attempt 
to imitate the real colours and relations of the 
earth and sky about jt. But at the close of 
the thirteenth century, Giotto, and in the course 
of the fourteenth, Orcagna, sought, for the first 
time, to give some resemblance to nature in 
their backgrounds, and introduced behind their 



I48 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

figures pieces of true landscape, formal enough 
still, but complete in intention, having fore- 
grounds and distances, sky and water, forests 
and mountains, carefully delineated, not exactly 
in their true colour, but yet in colour approxi- 
mating to the truth. The system which they 
introduced (for though in many points enriched 
above the work of earlier ages, the Orcagna 
and Giotto landscape was a very complete 
piece of recipe) was observed for a long period 
by their pupils, and may be thus briefly de- 
scribed : — The sky is always pure blue, 
paler at the horizon, and with a few streaky 
white clouds in it , the ground is green even 
to the extreme distance, with brown rocks pro- 
jecting from it ; water is blue streaked with 
white. The trees are nearly always composed 
of clusters of their proper leaves relieved on 
a black or dark ground, thus {fig* 20).* And 
observe carefully, with respect to the complete 
drawing of the leaves on this tree, and the 

* Having no memoranda of my own, taken from Giotto's 
landscape, I had this tree copied from an engraving ; but 
I imagine the rude termination of the stems to be a misrepre- 
sentation. Fig. 21 is accurately copied from a MS., cer- 
tainly executed between 1250 and 1 270, and is more truly 
characteristic of the early manner. 



Plate XIII. 




Fig. 20. 




Fig. 2r. 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 49 

smallness of their number, the real distinction 
between noble conventionalism and false con- 
ventionalism. You will often hear modern archi- 
tects defending their monstrous ornamentation 
on the ground that it is " conventional," and 
that architectural ornament ought to be con- 
ventionalised. Remember, when you hear this, 
that noble conventionalism is not an agreement 
between the artist and spectator that the one 
shall misrepresent nature sixty times over, and 
the other believe the misrepresentation sixty 
times over, but it is an agreement that certain 
means and limitations being prescribed, only 
that kind of tritth is to be expected which is 
consistent with those means. For instance, 
if Sir Joshua Reynolds had been talking to a 
friend about the character of a face, and there 
had been nothing in the room but a deal table 
and an inkbottle — and no pens — Sir Joshua 
would have dipped his finger in the ink, and 
painted a portrait on the table with his finger, 
and a noble portrait too ; certainly not delicate 
in outline, nor representing any of the quali- 
ties of the face dependent on rich outline, but 
getting as much of the face as in that manner 
was attainable. That is noble conventionalism, 



I50 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

and Egyptian work on granite, or illuminator's 
work in glass, is all conventional in the same 
sense, but not conventionally false. The two 
noblest and truest carved lions I have ever 
seen, are the two granite ones in the Egyptian 
room of the British Museum, and yet in them, 
the lions' manes and beards are represented by 
rings of solid rock, as smooth as a mirror ! 

85. There are indeed one or two other con- 
ditions of noble conventionalism, noticed more 
fully in the Addenda (§§ 68-71); but you 
will find that they always consist in stopping 
short of nature^ not in falsifying nature ; and 
thus in Giotto's foliage, he stops short of the 
quantity of leaves on the real tree, but he gives 
you the form of the leaves represented with 
perfect truth. His foreground also is nearly 
always occupied by flowers and herbage, care- 
fully and individually painted from nature ; 
while, although thus simple in plan, the ar- 
rangements of line in these landscapes of 
course show the influence of the master-mind, 
and sometimes, where the story requires it, we 
find the usual formulae overleaped, and Giotto 
at Avignon painting the breakers of the sea on 
a steep shore with great care, while Orcagna, 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 5 I 

in his Triumph of Death, has painted a thicket 
of brambles mixed with teazles, in a manner 
worthy of the best days of landscape art. 

86. Now from the landscape of these two 
men to the landscape of Raphael, Leonardo, 
and Perugino, the advance consists principally 
in two great steps : The first, that distant 
objects were more or less invested with a blue 
colour, — the second, that trees were no longer 
painted with a black ground, but with a rich 
dark brown, or deep green. From Giotto's old 
age, to the youth of Raphael, the advance in, 
and knowledge of, landscape, consisted of no 
more than these two simple steps ; but the 
execution of landscape became infinitely more 
perfect and elaborate. All the flowers and 
leaves in the foreground were worked out with 
the same perfection as the features of the 
figures ; in the middle distance the brown 
trees were most delicately defined against the 
sky; the blue mountains in the extreme dis- 
tance were exquisitely thrown into aerial gra- 
dations, and the sky and clouds were perfect 
in transparency and softness. But still there 
is no real advance in knowledge of natural ob- 
jects. The leaves and flowers are, indeed, 



152 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

admirably painted, and thrown into various 
intricate groupings, such as Giotto could not 
have attempted, but the rocks and water are 
still as conventional and imperfect as ever, 
except only in colour: the forms of rock in 
Leonardo's celebrated "Vierge aux Rochers" 
are literally no better than those on a china 
plate. Fig. 22 shows a portion of them in 
mere outline, with one cluster of the leaves 
above, and the distant " ideal " mountains. 
On the whole, the most satisfactory work of 
the period is that which most resembles missal 
painting, that is to say, which is fullest of 
beautiful flowers and animals scattered among 
the landscape, in the old independent way, 
like the birds upon a screen. The landscape 
of Benozzo Gozzoli is exquisitely rich in in- 
cident of this kind. 

87. The first man who entirely broke through 
the conventionality of his time, and painted 
pure landscape, was Masaccio, but he died too 
young to effect the revolution of which his 
genius was capable. It was left for other 
men to accomplish, namely, for Correggio and 
Titian. These two painters were the first who 
relieved the foregrounds of their landscape 



Plate XIV. 




Fig. 22. 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 53 

from the grotesque, quaint, and crowded for- 
malism of the early painters ; and gave a close 
approximation to the forms of nature in all 
things ; retaining, however, thus much of the 
old system, that the distances were for the 
most part painted in deep ultramarine blue, 
the foregrounds in rich green and brown ; 
there were no effects of sunshine and shadow, 
but a generally quiet glow over the whole 
scene; and the clouds, though now rolling in 
irregular masses, and sometimes richly involved 
among the hills, were never varied in concep- 
tion, or studied from nature. There were no 
changes of weather in them, no rain clouds or 
fair-weather clouds, nothing but various shapes 
of the cumulus or cirrus, introduced for the 
sake of light on the deep blue sky. Tintoret 
and Bonifazio introduced more natural effects 
into this monotonous landscape : in their 
works we meet with showers of rain, with rain- 
bows, sunsets, bright reflections in water, and so 
on; but still very subordinate, and carelessly 
worked out, so as not to justify us in consider- 
ing their landscape as forming a class by itself. 
88. Fig. 23, which is a branch of a tree 
from the background of Titian's " St. Jerome," 



154 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

at Milan, compared with fig. 20, will give you 
a distinct idea of the kind of change which 
took place from the time of Giotto to that of 
Titian, and you will find that this whole range 
of landscape may be conveniently classed in 
three divisions, namely, Giottesque, Leonard- 
esque ) and Titianesque ; the Giottesque em- 
bracing nearly all the work of the fourteenth, 
the Leonardesque that of the fifteenth, and 
the Titianesque that of the sixteenth century. 
Now you see there remained a fourth step to 
be taken, — the doing away with conventional- 
ism altogether, so as to create the perfect art 
of landscape painting. The course of the mind 
of Europe was to do this; but at the very 
moment when it ought to have been done, the 
art of all civilised nations was paralysed at 
once by the operation of the poisonous elements 
of infidelity and classical learning together, as 
I have endeavoured to show elsewhere. In 
this paralysis, like a soldier shot as he is just 
gaining an eminence, the art of the seventeenth 
century struggled forward, and sank upon the 
spot it had been endeavouring to attain. The 
step which should have freed landscape from 
conventionalism was actually taken by Claude 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 55 

and Salvator Rosa, but taken in a state of 
palsy, — taken so as to lose far more than was 
gained. Far up to this time, no painter ever 
had thought of drawing anything, pebble or 
blade of grass, or tree or mountain, but as 
well and distinctly as he could; and if he 
could not draw it completely, he drew it at 
least in a way which should thoroughly show 
his knowledge and feeling of it. For instance, 
you saw in the oak tree of the Giottesque 
period, that the main points of the tree, the 
true shape of leaf and acorn, were all there, 
perfectly and carefully articulated, and so they 
continued to be down to the time of Tintoret ; 
both he and Titian working out the separate 
leaves of their foliage with the most exquisite 
botanical care. But now observe : as Chris- 
tianity had brought this love of nature into 
Paganism, the return of Paganism in the shape 
of classical learning at once destroyed this love 
of nature ; and at the moment when Claude 
and Salvator made the final effort to paint the 
effects of nature faithfully, the objects of nature 
had ceased to be regarded with affection; so 
that, while people were amused and interested 
by the new effects of sunsets over green seas, 



156 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

and of tempests bursting on rocky mountains, 
which were introduced by the rising school, 
they entirely ceased to require on the one side, 
or bestow on the other, that care and thought 
by which alone the beauty of nature can be 
understood. The older painting had resembled 
a careful and deeply studied diagram, illustra- 
tive of the most important facts ; it was not to 
be understood or relished without application 
of serious thought; on the contrary, it de- 
veloped and addressed the highest powers 
of mind belonging to the human race; while 
the Claude and Salvator painting was like a 
scene in a theatre, viciously and falsely painted 
throughout, and presenting a deceptive appear- 
ance of truth to nature ; understood, as far as 
it went, in a moment, but conveying no ac- 
curate knowledge of anything, and, in all its 
operations on the mind, unhealthy, hopeless, 
and profitless. 

89. It was, however, received with avidity; 
for this main reason, that the architecture, 
domestic life, and manners of the period were 
gradually getting more and more artificial ; as 
I showed you last evening, all natural beauty 
had ceased to be permitted in architectural 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 57 

decoration, while the habits of society led them 
more and more to live, if possible, in cities ; and 
the dress, language, and manners of men in 
general were approximating to that horrible and 
lifeless condition in which you find them just 
before the outbreak of the French Revolution. 

Now, observe : exactly as hoops, and starch, 
and false hair, and all that in mind and heart 
these things typify and betray, as these, I 
say, gained upon men, there was a necessary 
reaction in favour of the natural. Men had 
never lived so utterly in defiance of the laws 
of nature before; but they could not do this 
without feeling a strange charm in that which 
they defied ; and, accordingly, we find this re- 
actionary sentiment expressing itself in a base 
school of what was called pastoral poetry; 
that is to say, poetry written in praise of the 
country, by men who lived in coffee-houses 
and on the Mall. The essence of pastoral 
poetry is the sense of strange delightfulness 
in grass, which is occasionally felt by a man 
who has seldom set his foot on it; it is 
essentially the poetry of the cockney, and 
for the most part corresponds in its aim and 
rank, as compared with other literature, to the 



I58 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses on a 
chimney-piece as compared with great works 
of sculpture. 

90. Of course all good poetry, descriptive 
of rural life, is essentially pastoral, or has the 
effect of the pastoral on the minds of men 
living in cities ; but the clas$ of poetry which 
I mean, and which you probably understand 
by the term pastoral, is that in which a 
farmers girl is spoken of as a u nymph/ 7 and 
a farmer's boy as a "swain," and in which, 
throughout, a ridiculous and unnatural refine- 
ment is supposed to exist in rural life, merely 
because the poet himself has neither had the 
courage to endure its hardships, nor the wit 
to conceive its realities. If you examine the 
literature of the 17th and 18th centuries you 
will find that nearly all its expressions, having 
reference to the country, show something of 
this kind ; either a foolish sentimentality, or a 
morbid fear, both of course coupled with the 
most curious ignorance. You will find all its 
descriptive expressions at once vague and 
monotonous. Brooks are always "purling;" 
birds always "warbling;" mountains always 
"lift their horrid peaks above the clouds;" 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 59 

vales always "are lost in the shadow of 
gloomy woods;" a few more distinct ideas 
about haymaking and curds and cream, ac- 
quired in the neighbourhood of Richmond 
Bridge, serving to give an occasional appear- 
ance of freshness to the catalogue of the 
sublime and beautiful which descended from 
poet to poet ; while a few true pieces of pas- 
toral, like the " Vicar of Wakefield," and 
Walton's " Angler," relieved the general waste 
of dulness. Even in these better productions, 
nothing is more remarkable than the general 
conception of the country merely as a series 
of green fields, and the combined ignorance 
and dread of more sublime scenery ; of which 
the mysteries and dangers were enhanced by 
the difficulties of travelling at the period. 
Thus in Walton's " Angler," you have a meet- 
ing of two friends, one a Derbyshire man, 
the other a lowland traveller, who is as much 
alarmed, and uses nearly as many expressions 
of astonishment, at having to go down a steep 
hill and ford a brook, as a traveller uses now 
at crossing the glacier of the Col du Geant. 
I am not sure whether the difficulties which, 
until late years, have lain in the way of peaceful 



l60 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

and convenient travelling, ought not to have 
great weight assigned to them among the 
other causes of the temper of the period ; but 
be that as it may, if you will examine the 
whole range of its literature — keeping this 
point in view — I am well persuaded that you 
will be struck most forcibly by the strange 
deadness to the higher sources of landscape 
sublimity which is mingled with the morbid 
pastoralism. The love of fresh air and green 
grass forced itself upon the animal natures of 
men; but that of the sublimer features of 
scenery had no place in minds whose chief 
powers had been repressed by the formalisms 
of the age. And although in the second-rate 
writers continually, and in the "first-rate ones 
occasionally, you find an affectation of interest 
in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet when- 
ever they write from their heart, you will find 
an utter absence of feeling respecting anything 
beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for 
instance, the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and 
Sterne, the comedies of Moliere, and the writ- 
ings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not 
think you will find a single expression of true 
delight in sublime nature in any one of them. 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. l6l 

Perhaps Sterne's " Sentimental Journey," in 
its total absence of sentiment on any subject 
but humanity, and its entire want of notice 
of anything at Geneva, which might not as 
well have been seen at Coxwold, is the most 
striking instance I could give you ; and if you 
compare with this negation of feeling on one 
side, the interludes of Moliere, in which shep- 
herds and shepherdesses are introduced in 
court dress, you will have a very accurate con- 
ception of the general spirit of the age. 

91. It was in such a state of society that 
the landscape of Claude, Gaspar Poussin, and 
Salvator Rosa attained its reputation. It is 
the complete expression on canvas of the spirit 
of the time. Claude embodies the foolish 
pastoralism, Salvator the ignorant terror, and 
Gaspar the dull and affected erudition. 

It was, however, altogether impossible that 
this state of things could long continue. The 
age which had buried itself in formalism grew 
weary at last of the restraint ; and the approach 
of a new aera was marked by the appearance, 
and the enthusiastic reception, of writers who 
took true delight in those wild scenes of nature 
which had so long been despised. 

L 



1 62 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

92. I think the first two writers in whom 
the symptoms of a change are strongly mani- 
fested are Mrs. Radcliffe and Rousseau; in 
both of whom the love of natural scenery, 
though mingled in the one case with what was 
merely dramatic, and in the other with much 
that was pitifully morbid or vicious, was still 
itself genuine, and intense, differing altogether 
in character from any sentiments previously 
traceable in literature. And then rapidly fol- 
lowed a group of writers, who expressed, in 
various ways, the more powerful or more 
pure feeling which had now become one of 
the strongest instincts of the age. Of these, 
the principal is your own Walter Scott. Many 
writers, indeed, describe nature more minute- 
ly and more profoundly; but none show in 
higher intensity the peculiar passion for what 
is majestic or lovely in wild nature, to which 
I am now referring. The whole of the poem 
of the u Lady of the Lake " is written with 
almost a boyish enthusiasm for rocks, and 
lakes, and cataracts ; the early novels show the 
same instinct in equal strength wherever he 
approaches Highland scenery; and the feel- 
ing is mingled, observe, with a most touching 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 163 

and affectionate appreciation of the Gothic 
architecture, in which alone he found the ele- 
ments of natural beauty seized by art; so 
that, to this day, his descriptions of Melrose 
and Holy Island Cathedral, in the " Lay of 
the Last Minstrel " and " Marmion," as well 
as of the ideal abbeys in the " Monastery M 
and " Antiquary," together with those of Caer- 
laverock and Lochleven Castles in " Guy Man- 
nering" and "The Abbot," remain the staple 
possessions and text-books of all travellers, 
not so much for their beauty or accuracy, as 
for their exactly expressing that degree of 
feeling with which most men in this century 
can sympathise. 

Together with Scott appeared the group of 
poets — Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, 
and, finally, Tennyson — differing widely in 
moral principles and spiritual temper, but all 
agreeing more or less in this love for natural 
scenery. 

93. Now, you will ask me — and you will 
ask me most reasonably — how this love of 
nature in modern days can be connected 
with Christianity, seeing it is as strong in the 
infidel Shelley as in the sacred Wordsworth. 



1 64 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

Yes, and it is found in far worse men than 
Shelley. Shelley was an honest unbeliever, 
and a man of warm affections ; but this new 
love of nature is found in the most reckless 
and unprincipled of the French novelists — in 
Eugene Sue, in Dumas, in George Sand — and 
that intensely. How is this ? Simply because 
the feeling is reactionary ; and, in this phase 
of it, common to the diseased mind as well 
as to the healthy one. A man dying in the 
fever of intemperance will cry out for water, 
and that with a bitterer thirst than a man 
whose healthy frame naturally delights in the 
mountain spring more than in the wine cup. 
The water is not dishonoured by that thirst of 
the diseased, nor is nature dishonoured by the 
love of the unworthy. That love is, perhaps, 
the only saving element in their minds ; and 
it still remains an indisputable truth that the 
love of nature is a characteristic of the Chris- 
tian heart, just as the hunger for healthy food 
is characteristic of the healthy frame. 

In order to meet this new feeling for nature, 
there necessarily arose a new school of land- 
scape painting. That school, like the literature 
to which it corresponded, had many weak and 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. l6$ 

vicious elements mixed with its noble ones ; 
it had its Mrs. Radcliffes and Rousseaus, as 
well as its Wordsworths; but, on the whole, 
the feeling with which Robson drew mountains, 
and Prout architecture, with which Fielding 
draws moors, and Stanfield sea — is altogether 
pure, true, and precious, as compared with that 
which suggested the landscape of the seven- 
teenth century. 

94. Now observe, how simple the whole sub- 
ject becomes. You have, first, your great ancient 
landscape divided into its three periods — Giot- 
tesque, Leonardesque, Titianesque. Then you 
have a great gap, full of nonentities and abor- 
tions ; a gulf of foolishness, into the bottom 
of which you may throw Claude and Salva- 
tor, neither of them deserving to give a name 
to anything. Call it "pastoral" landscape, 
" guarda e passa," and then you have, lastly, 
the pure, wholesome, simple, modern landscape. 
You want a name for that : I will give you 
one in a moment ; for the whole character and 
power of that landscape is originally based on 
the work of one man. 

95. Joseph Mallord William Turner was 
born in Maiden Lane, London, about eighty 



1 66 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

years ago. The register of his birth was 
burned, and his age at his death could only 
be arrived at by conjecture. He was the son 
of a barber ; and his father intended him, very 
properly, for his own profession. The bent of 
the boy was, however, soon manifested, as is 
always the case in children of extraordinary 
genius, too strongly to be resisted; and a 
sketch of a coat of arms on a silver salver, 
made while his father was shaving a customer, 
obtained for him, in reluctant compliance with 
the admiring customer's advice, the permission 
to follow art as a profession. 

He had, of course, the usual difficulties of 
young artists to encounter, and they were then 
far greater than they are now. But Turner 
differed from most men in this, — that he was 
always willing to take anything to do that 
came in his way. He did not shut himself up 
in a garret to produce unsaleable works of 
" high art," and starve, or lose his senses. 
He hired himself out every evening to wash in 
skies in Indian ink, on other people's drawings, 
as many as he could, at half-a-crown a-night, 
getting his supper into the bargain. "What 
could I have done better ? " he said afterwards: 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 67 

" it was first-rate practice." Then he took to 
illustrating guide-books and almanacks, and 
anything that wanted cheap frontispieces. The 
Oxford Almanack, published on a single sheet, 
with a copper-plate at the top of it, consisting 
of a " View " — you perhaps, some of you, 
know the kind of print characteristic of the 
last century, under which the word " View M is 
always printed in large letters, with a dedi- 
cation, obsequious to the very dust, to the 
Grand Signior of the neighbourhood. Well, 
this Almanack had always such a view of some 
Oxford College at the top of it, dedicated, I 
think, always to the head of the College ; and 
it owed this, its principal decoration, to Turner 
for many years. I have myself two careful 
drawings of some old seals, made by him for 
a local book on the antiquities of Whalley 
Abbey. And there was hardly a gentleman's 
seat of any importance in England, towards 
the close of the last century, of which you will 
not find some rude engraving in the local 
publications of the time, inscribed with the 
simple name " W. Turner." 

96. There was another great difference be- 
tween Turner and other men. In doing these 



1 68 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

drawings for the commonest publications of 
the day, and for a remuneration altogether 
contemptible, he never did his work badly 
because he thought it beneath him, or because 
he was ill-paid. There does not exist such a 
thing as a slovenly drawing by Turner. With 
what people were willing to give him for his 
work he was content ; but he considered that 
work in its relation to himself, not in its rela- 
tion to the purchaser. He took a poor price, 
that he might live ; but he made noble draw- 
ings, that he might learn. Of course some 
are slighter than others, and they vary in their 
materials ; those executed with pencil and In- 
dian ink being never finished to the degree 
of those which are executed in colour. But 
he is never careless. According to the time 
and means at his disposal, he always did his 
best. He never let a drawing leave his hands 
without having made a step in advance, and 
having done better in it than he had ever done 
before ; and there is no important drawing of 
the period which is not executed with a total 
disregard of time and price, and which was 
not, even then, worth four or five times what 
Turner received for it. 



[II. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 69 

Even without genius, a man who thus felt 
and thus laboured was sure to do great things ; 
though it is seldom that, without great genius, 
men either thus feel or thus labour. Turner 
was as far beyond all other men in intellect as 
in industry; and his advance in power and 
grasp of thought was as steady as the increas- 
ing light of sunrise. 

97. His reputation was soon so far estab- 
lished that he was able to devote himself to 
more consistent study. He never appears 
literally to have copied any picture ; but when- 
ever any master interested him, or was of so 
established a reputation that he thought it 
necessary to study him, he painted pictures of 
his own subjects in the style of that master, 
until he felt himself able to rival his excel- 
lencies, whatever they were. There are thus 
multitudes of pictures by Turner which are 
direct imitations of other masters; especially 
of Claude, Wilson, Loutherbourg, Gaspar 
Poussin, Vandevelde, Cuyp, and Rembrandt. 
It has been argued by Mr. Leslie that, because 
Turner thus in his early years imitated many 
of the old masters, therefore he must to the 
end of his life have considered them greater 



I70 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

than himself. The non sequitur is obvious. I 
trust there are few men so unhappy as never 
to have learned anything from their inferiors ; 
and I fear there are few men so wise as never 
to have imitated anything but what was deserv- 
ing of imitation. The young Turner, indeed, 
would have been more than mortal if, in a 
period utterly devoid of all healthy examples 
of landscape art, he had been able at once to 
see his way to the attainment of his ultimate 
ends; or if, seeing it, he had felt himself at 
once strong enough to defy the authority of 
every painter and connoisseur whose style had 
formed the taste of the public, or whose dicta 
directed their patronage. 

98. But the period when he both felt and 
resolved to assert his own superiority was 
indicated with perfect clearness, by his publish- 
ing a series of engravings, which were nothing 
else than direct challenges to Claude— then the 
landscape painter supposed to be the greatest 
in the world — upon his own ground and his 
own terms. You are probably all aware that 
the studies made by Claude for his pictures, 
and kept by him under the name of the " Liber 
Veritatis," were for the most part made with 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. I/I 

pen and ink, washed over with a brown tint ; 
and that these drawings have been carefully 
fac-similed and published in the form of mezzo- 
tint engravings, long supposed to be models of 
taste in landscape composition. In order to 
provoke comparison between Claude and him- 
self, Turner published a series of engravings, 
called the "Liber Studiorum," executed in 
exactly the same manner as these drawings 
of Claude, — an etching representing what was 
done with the pen, while mezzotint stood for 
colour. You see the notable publicity of this 
challenge. Had he confined himself to pictures 
in his trial of skill with Claude, it would only 
have been in the gallery or the palace that the 
comparison could have been instituted; but 
now it is in the power of all who are interested 
in the matter to make it at their ease.* 



* When this Lecture was delivered, an enlarged copy of a 
portion of one of these studies by Claude was set beside a 
similarly magnified portion of one by Turner. It was im- 
possible, without much increasing the cost of the publication, 
to prepare two mezzotint engravings with the care requisite 
for this purpose ; and the portion of the Lecture relating to 
these examples is therefore omitted. It is, however, in the 
power of every reader to procure one or more plates of each 
series ; and to judge for himself whether the conclusion of 



172 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

99. Now, what Turner did in contest with 
Claude, he did with every other then-known 
master of landscape, each in his turn. He 
challenged, and vanquished, each in his own 
peculiar field, Vandevelde on the sea, Salvator 
among rocks, and Cuyp on Lowland rivers; 
and, having done this, set himself to paint the 
natural scenery of skies, mountains, and lakes, 
which, until his time, had never been so much 
as attempted. 

He thus, in the extent of his sphere, far 
surpassed even Titian and Leonardo, the great 
men of the earlier schools. In their fore- 
ground work neither Titian nor Leonardo could 
be excelled; but Titian and Leonardo were 
thoroughly conventional in all but their fore- 
grounds. Turner was equally great in all the 
elements of landscape, and it is on him, and 
on his daring additions to the received schemes 
of landscape art, that all modern landscape has 
been founded. You will never meet any truly 
great living landscape painter who will not at 
once frankly confess his obligations to Turner, 
not, observe, as having copied him, but as 

Turner's superiority, which is assumed in the next sentence 
of the text, be a just one or not. 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 73 

having been led by Turner to look in nature 
for what he would otherwise either not have 
discerned, or discerning, not have dared to 
represent. 

100. Turner, therefore, was the first man 
who presented us with the type of perfect land- 
scape art : and the richness of that art, with 
which you are at present surrounded, and 
which enables you to open your walls as it 
were into so many windows, through which 
you can see whatever has charmed you in the 
fairest scenery of your country, you will do 
well to remember as Turneresque. 

So then you have these five periods to 
recollect — you will have no difficulty, I trust, 
in doing so, — the periods of Giotto, Leonardo, 
Titian, pastoralism, and Turner. 

10 1. But Turner's work is yet only begun. 
His greatness is, as yet, altogether denied by 
many ; and to the full, felt by very few. But 
every day that he lies in his grave will bring 
some new acknowledgment of his power ; and 
through those eyes, now filled with dust, gene- 
rations yet unborn will learn to behold the 
light of nature. 

You have some ground to-night to accuse 



174 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

me of dogmatism. I can bring no proof before 
you of what I so boldly assert. But I would 
not have accepted your invitation to address 
you, unless I had felt that I had a right to 
be, in this matter, dogmatic. I did not come 
here to tell you of my beliefs or my con- 
jectures; I came to tell you the truth which 
I have given fifteen years of my life to ascer- 
tain, that this man, this Turner, of whom you 
have known so little while he was living among 
you, will one day take his place beside Shak- 
speare and Verulam, in the annals of the 
light of England. 

Yes : beside Shakspeare and Verulam, a 
third star in that central constellation, round 
which, in the astronomy of intellect, all other 
stars make their circuit. By Shakspeare, 
humanity was unsealed to you; by Verulam 
the principles of nature ; and by Turner, her 
aspect. All these were sent to unlock one 
of the gates of light, and to unlock it for 
the first time. But of all the three, though 
not the greatest, Turner was the most unpre- 
cedented in his work. Bacon did what Aris- 
totle had attempted ; Shakspeare did perfectly 
what iEschylus did partially ; but none before 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 75 

Turner had lifted the veil from the face of 
nature; the majesty of the hills and forests 
had received no interpretation, and the clouds 
passed unrecorded from the face of the heaven 
which they adorned, and of the earth to which 
they ministered. 

102. And now let me tell you something of 
his personal character. You have heard him 
spoken of as ill-natured, and jealous of his 
brother artists. I will tell you how jealous 
he was. I knew him for ten years, and during 
that time had much familiar intercourse with 
him. I never once heard him say an unkind 
thing of a brother artist, and / never once 
heard him find a fault with another man's 
work. I could say this of no other artist whom 
I have ever known. 

But I will add a piece of evidence on this 
matter of peculiar force. Probably many here 
have read a book which has been lately pub- 
lished, to my mind one of extreme interest and 
value, the life of the unhappy artist, Benjamin 
Haydon. Whatever may have been his faults, 
I believe no person can read his journal with- 
out coming to the conclusion that his heart 
was honest, and that he does not wilfully 



I76 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

misrepresent any fact, or any person. Even 
supposing otherwise, the expression I am 
going to quote to you would have all the more 
force, because, as you know, Haydon passed 
his whole life in war with the Royal Academy, 
of which Turner was one of the most influen- 
tial members. Yet in the midst of one of his 
most violent expressions of exultation at one 
of his victories over the Academy, he draws 
back suddenly with these words : — "But Turner 
behaved well, and did me justice." 

103. I will give you however besides, two 
plain facts illustrative of Turner's "jealousy." 

You have, perhaps not many of you, heard 
of a painter of the name of Bird : I do not 
myself know his works, but Turner saw some 
merit in them : and when Bird first sent a 
picture to the Academy, for exhibition, Turner 
was on the hanging committee. Bird's picture 
had great merit ; but no place for it could be 
found. Turner pleaded hard for it. No, the 
thing was impossible. Turner sat down and 
looked at Bird's picture a long time ; then in- 
sisted that a place must be found for it. He 
was still met by the assertion of impractica- 
bility. He said no more, but took down one 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. I J? 

of his own pictures, sent it out of the Academy, 
and hung Bird's in its place. 

Match that, if you can, among the annals of 
hanging committees. But he could do nobler 
things than this. 

104. When Turner's picture of Cologne was 
exhibited in the year 1826, it was hung between 
two portraits, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, of Lady 
Wallscourt and Lady Robert Manners. 

The sky of Turner's picture was exceedingly 
bright, and it had a most injurious effect on 
the colour of the two portraits. Lawrence 
naturally felt mortified, and complained open- 
ly of the position of his pictures. You are 
aware that artists were at that time permitted 
to retouch their pictures on the walls of the 
Academy. On the morning of the opening of 
the exhibition, at the private view, a friend of 
Turner's who had seen the Cologne in all its- 
splendour, led a group of expectant critics up 
to the picture. He started back from it in 
consternation. The golden sky had changed 
to a dun colour. He ran up to Turner, who 
was in another part of the room. " Turner, 
what have you been doing to your picture ? " 

" Oh," muttered Turner, in a low voice, " poor^ 

M 



I78 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

Lawrence was so unhappy. It's only lamp- 
black. It'll all wash off after the exhibition ! " 
He had actually passed a wash of lamp-black 
in water-colour over the whole sky, and utterly 
spoiled his picture for the time, and so left 
it through the exhibition, lest it should hurt 
Lawrence's. 

You may easily find instances of self-sacrifice 
where men have strong motives, and where 
large benefits are to be conferred by the effort, 
or general admiration obtained by it; but of 
pure, unselfish, and perfect generosity, showing 
itself in a matter of minor interest, and when 
few could be aware of the sacrifice made, you 
will not easily find such another example as this. 

105. Thus much for his jealousy of his 
brother-artists. You have also heard much of 
his niggardliness in money transactions. A 
great part of what you have heard is per- 
fectly true, allowing for the exaggeration which 
always takes place in the accounts of an eccen- 
tric character. But there are other parts of 
Turner's conduct of which you have never 
heard; and which, if truly reported, would 
set his niggardliness in a very different light. 
Every person from whom Turner exacted a 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. 1 79 

due shilling, proclaimed the exaction far and 
wide; but the persons to whom Turner gave 
hundreds of pounds were prevented, by their 
" delicacy," from reporting the kindness of 
their benefactor. I may, however, perhaps, be 
permitted to acquaint you with one circum- 
stance of this nature, creditable alike to both 
parties concerned. 

At the death of a poor drawing master, 
Mr. Wells,* whom Turner had long known, 
he was deeply affected, and lent money to 
the widow until a large sum had accumulated. 
She was both honest and grateful, and after 
a long period was happy enough to be able 
to return to her benefactor the whole sum she 
had received from him. She waited on him 
with it; but Turner kept his hands in his 
pockets. " Keep it," he said, " and send your 
children to school, and to church." He said 
this in bitterness; he had himself been sent 
to neither. 

* Not the Mr. Wells who taught drawing at Addiscombe. 
It appears that Turner knew two persons of the same name, 
and in the same profession. I am not permitted to name 
my authority for the anecdote ; various egotistic " delicacies," 
even in this case, preventing useful truth from being clearly 
assured to the public. 



l80 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

106. "Well, but/' you will answer to me, 
" we have heard Turner all our lives stigma- 
tised as brutal, and uncharitable, and selfish, 
and miserly. How are we to understand these 
opposing statements ? " 

Easily. I have told you truly what Turner 
was. You have often heard what to most 
people he appeared to be. Imagine what it 
was for a man to live seventy years in this 
hard world, with the kindest heart, and e the 
noblest intellect of his time, and never to meet 
with a single word or ray of sympathy, until 
he felt himself sinking into the grave. From 
the time he knew his true greatness all the 
world was turned against him : he held his 
own ; but it could not be without roughness 
of bearing, and hardening of the temper, if not 
of the heart. No one understood him, no one 
trusted him, and every one cried out against 
him. Imagine, any of you, the effect upon 
your own minds, if every voice that you heard 
from the human beings around you were raised, 
year after year, through all your lives, only in 
condemnation of your efforts, and denial of your 
success. This may be borne, and borne easily, 
by men who have fixed religious principles, 



III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS. l8l 

or supporting domestic ties. But Turner had 
no one to teach him in his youth, and no 
one to love him in his old age. Respect and 
affection, if they came at all, came unbelieved, 
or came too late. Naturally irritable, though 
kind — naturally suspicious, though generous — 
the gold gradually became dim, and the most 
fine gold changed, or, if not changed, overcast 
and clouded. The deep heart was still beat- 
ing, but it was beneath a dark and melancholy 
mail, between whose joints, however, some- 
times the slightest arrows found entrance, and 
power of giving pain. He received no consola- 
tion in his last years^ nor in his death. Cut off 
in great part from all society — first, by labour, 
and at last by sickness — hunted to his grave 
by the malignities of small critics, and the 
jealousies of hopeless rivalry, he died in the 
house of a stranger — one companion of his life, 
and one only, staying with him to the last. 
The window of his death-chamber was turned 
towards the west, and the sun shone upon his 
face in its setting, and rested there, as he 
expired. 



LECTURE IV. 

PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 

Delivered November 18, 1853. 

107. THE subject on which I would desire 
to engage your attention this evening, is the 
nature and probable result of a certain schism 
which took place a few years ago among our 
British artists. 

This schism, or rather the heresy which led 
to it, as you are probably aware, was intro- 
duced by a small number of very young men ; 
and consists mainly in the assertion that the 
principles on which art has been taught for 
these three hundred years back are essentially 
wrong, and that the principles which ought to 
guide us are those which prevailed before the 
time of Raphael ; in adopting which, therefore, 
as their guides, these young men, as a sort 

of bond of unity among themselves, took the 

182 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 1 83 

unfortunate and somewhat ludicrous name of 
" Pre-Raphaelite Brethren." 

108. You must also be aware that this heresy 
has been opposed with all the influence and all 
the bitterness of art and criticism ; but that in 
spite of these the heresy has gained ground, 
and the pictures painted on these new princi- 
ples have obtained a most extensive popularity. 
These circumstances are sufficiently singular, 
but their importance is greater even than their 
singularity; and your time will certainly not 
be wasted in devoting an hour to an inquiry 
into the true nature of this movement. 

I shall first, therefore, endeavour to state to 
you what the real difference is between the 
principles of art before and after Raphael's 
time, and then to ascertain, with you, how far 
these young men truly have understood the 
difference, and what may be hoped or feared 
from the effort they are making. 

109. First, then, What is the real difference 
between the principles on which art has been 
pursued before and since Raphael ? You must 
be aware, that the principal ground on which 
the Pre-Raphaelites have been attacked, is the 
charge that they wish to bring us back to a 



I84 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

time of darkness and ignorance, when the 
principles of drawing, and of art in general, 
were comparatively unknown ; and this attack, 
therefore, is entirely founded on the assumption 
that, although for some unaccountable reason 
we cannot at present produce artists altogether 
equal to Raphael, yet that we are on the whole 
in a state of greater illumination than, at all 
events, any artists who preceded Raphael ; so 
that we consider ourselves entitled to look 
down upon them, and to say that, all things 
considered, they did some wonderful things 
for their time; but that, as for comparing the 
art of Giotto to that of Wilkie or Edwin Land- 
seer, it would be perfectly ridiculous/ — the one 
being a mere infant in his profession, and the 
others accomplished workmen. 

Now, that this progress has in somethings 
taken place is perfectly true; but it is true 
also that this progress is by no means the 
main thing to be noticed respecting ancient 
and modern art ; that there are other circum- 
stances, connected with the change from one to 
the other, immeasurably more important, and 
which, until very lately, have been altogether 
lost sight of. 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. I 8 5 

I io. The fact is, that modern art is not so 
much distinguished from old art by greater 
skill, as by a radical change in temper. The 
art of this day is not merely a more knowing 
art than that of the thirteenth century, — it is 
altogether another art. Between the two there 
is a great gulf, a distinction for ever inefface- 
able. The change from one to the other was 
not that of the child into the man, as we usually 
consider it ; it was that of the chrysalis into 
the butterfly. There was an entire change 
in the habits, food, method of existence, and 
heart of the whole creature. That we know 
more than thirteenth century people is perfectly 
true; but that is not the essential difference 
between us and them. We are different kind 
of creatures from them, — as different as moths 
are different from caterpillars ; and different in 
a certain broad and vast sense, which I shall 
try this evening to explain and prove to you ; 
— different not merely in this or that result 
of minor circumstances, — not as you are dif- 
ferent from people who never saw a locomo- 
tive engine, or a Highlander of this century 
from a Highlander of 1745 ; — different in a far 
broader and mightier sense than that; in a 



1 86 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

sense so great and clear, that we are enabled 
to separate all the Christian nations and 
tongues of the early time from those of the 
latter time, and speak of them in one group as 
the kingdoms of the Middle Ages. There is 
an infinite significance in that term, which I 
want you to dwell upon and work out ; it is a 
term which we use in a dim consciousness of 
the truth, but without fully penetrating into 
that of which we are conscious. I want to 
deepen and make clear to you this conscious- 
ness that the world has had essentially a 
Trinity of ages — the Classical Age, the Middle 
Age, the Modern Age ; each of these em- 
bracing races and individuals of apparently 
enormous separation in kind, but united in 
the spirit of their age, — the Classical Age 
having its Egyptians and Ninevites, Greeks 
and Romans, — the Middle Age having its 
Goths and Franks, Lombards and Italians, 
— the Modern Age having its French and 
English, Spaniards and Germans ; but all these 
distinctions being in each case subordinate to 
the mightier and broader distinction, between 
Classicalisniy Medicevalism } and Modernism. 
in. Now our object to-night is indeed only 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 1 87 

to inquire into a matter of art ; but we cannot 
do so properly until we consider this art in 
its relation to the inner spirit of the age in 
which it exists; and by doing so we shall 
not only arrive at the most just conclusions 
respecting our present subject, but we shall 
obtain the means of arriving at just conclusions 
respecting many other things. 

Now the division of time which the Pre- 
Raphaelites have adopted, in choosing Raphael 
as the man whose works mark the separation 
between Mediaevalism and Modernism, is per- 
fectly accurate. It has been accepted as such 
by all their opponents. 

You have, then, the three periods : Classi- 
calism, extending to the fall of the Roman 
empire; Mediaevalism, extending from that 
fall to the close of the fifteenth century ; and 
Modernism thenceforward to our days. 

112. And in examining into the spirit of 
these three epochs, observe, I don't mean to 
compare their bad men, — I don't mean to take 
Tiberius as a type of Classicalism, nor Ezzelin 
as a type of Mediaevalism, nor Robespierre as 
a type of Modernism. Bad men are like each 
other in all epochs; and in the Roman, the 



1 88 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

Paduan, or the Parisian, sensuality and cruelty 
admit of little distinction in the manners of 
their manifestation. But among men com- 
paratively virtuous, it is important to study 
the phases of character; and it is into these 
only that it is necessary for us to inquire. 
Consider therefore, first, the essential difference 
in character between three of the most devoted 
military heroes whom the three great epochs 
of the world have produced,- — all three de- 
voted to the service of their country, — all of 
them dying therein. I mean, Leonidas in 
the Classical period, St. Louis in the Medi- 
aeval period, and Lord Nelson in the Modern 
period. 

Leonidas had the most rigid sense of duty, 
and died with the most perfect faith in the 
gods of his country, fulfilling the accepted pro- 
phecy of his death. St. Louis had the most 
rigid sense of duty, and the most perfect faith 
in Christ. Nelson had the most rigid sense of 
duty, and 

You must supply my pause with your 
charity. 

Now you do not suppose that the main 
difference between Leonidas and Nelson lay 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 1 89 

in the modern inventions at the command 
of the one, as compared with the imperfect 
military instruments possessed by the other. 
They were not essentially different, in that 
the one fought with lances and the other with 
guns. But they were essentially different in 
the whole tone of their religious belief. 

113. By this instance you may be partially 
prepared for the bold statement I am going 
to make to you, as to the change which con- 
stitutes Modernism. I said just now that it 
was like that of the worm to the butterfly. 
But the changes which God causes in His 
lower creatures are almost always from worse 
to better, while the changes which God allows 
man to make in himself are very often quite 
the other way ; like Adam's new arrangement 
of his nature. And in saying that this last 
change was like that of a chrysalis, I meant 
only in the completeness of it, not in the ten- 
dency of it. Instead of from the worm to the 
butterfly, it is very possible it may have been 
from the butterfly to the worm. 

Have patience with me for a moment after 
I tell you what I- -believe- -it to have been, and 
give me a little time to justify my words. 



I9O ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

114. I say that Classicalism began, wher- 
ever civilisation began, with Pagan Faith. 
Mediaevalism began, and continued, wherever 
civilisation began and continued to confess 
Christ. And, lastly, Modernism began and 
continues, wherever civilisation began and con- 
tinues to deny Christ. 

You are startled, but give me a moment to 
explain. What, you would say to me, do you 
mean to tell us that we deny Christ ? we who 
are essentially modern in every one of our 
principles and feelings, and yet all of us pro- 
fessing believers in Christ, and we trust most 
of us true ones ? I answer, So far as we are 
believers indeed, we are one with the faithful 
of all times, — one with the classical believer 
of Athens and Ephesus, and one with the 
mediaeval believer of the banks of the Rhone 
and the valleys of the Monte Viso. But so 
far as, in various strange ways, some in great 
and some in small things, we deny this belief, 
in so far we are essentially infected with this 
spirit, which I call Modernism. 

115. For observe, the change of which I 
speak has nothing whatever to do with the 
Reformation, or with any of its effects. It is 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. I9I 

a far broader thing than the Reformation. It 
is a change which has taken place, not only 
in reformed England, and reformed Scotland; 
but in unreformed France, in unreformed 
Italy, in unreformed Austria. I class honest 
Protestants and honest Roman Catholics for 
the present together, under the general term 
Christians : if you object to their being so 
classed together, I pray your pardon, but allow 
me to do so at present, for the sake of per- 
spicuity, if for nothing else; and so class- 
ing them, I say that a change took place, 
about the time of Raphael, in the spirit of 
Roman Catholics and Protestants both; and 
that change consisted in the denial of their 
religious belief, at least in the external and 
trivial affairs of life, and often in far more 
serious things. 

116. For instance, hear this direction to an 
upholsterer of the early thirteenth century. 
Under the commands of the Sheriff of Wilt- 
shire, he is thus ordered to make some altera- 
tions in a room for Henry the Third. He is 
to " wainscot the King's lower chamber, and 
to paint that wainscot of a green colour, 
and to put a border to it, and to cause the 



192 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

heads of kings and queens to be painted on 
the borders ; and to paint on the walls of the 
King's upper chamber the story of St. Mar- 
garet, Virgin, and the four Evangelists, and 
to paint the wainscot of the same chamber of 
a green colour, spotted with gold." * 

Again, the Sheriff of Wiltshire is ordered 
to " put two small glass windows in the 
chamber of Edward the King's son ; and put a 
glass window in the chamber of our Queen 
at Clarendon ; and in the same window cause 
to be painted a Mary with her Child, and at 
the feet of the said Mary, a queen with clasped 
hands." 

Again, the Sheriff of Southampton is ordered 
to "paint the tablet beside the King's bed, 
with the figures of the guards of the bed of 
Solomon, and to glaze with white glass the 
windows in the King's great Hall at North- 
ampton, and cause the history of Lazarus and 
Dives to be painted in the same." 

117. And so on; I need not multiply in- 
stances. You see that in all these cases, the 

* Liberate Rolls, preserved in the Tower of London, and 
quoted by Mr. Turner in his History of the Domestic Archi- 
tecture of England. 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. I93 

furniture of the King's house is made to con- 
fess his Christianity. It may be imperfect 
and impure Christianity, but such as it might 
be, it was all that men had then to live and 
die by ; and you see there was not a pane of 
glass in their windows, nor a pallet by their 
bedside that did not confess and proclaim it. 
Now, when you go home to your own rooms, 
supposing them, to be richly decorated at 
all, examine what that decoration consists of. 
You will find Cupids, Graces, Floras, Dianas, 
Jupiters, Junos. But you will not find, except 
in the form of an engraving, bought princi- 
pally for its artistic beauty, either Christ, or 
the Virgin, or Lazarus and Dives. And if a 
thousand years hence, any curious investi- 
gator were to dig up the ruins of Edinburgh, 
and not know your history, he would think 
you had all been born heathens. Now that, 
so far as it goes, is denying Christ ; it is pure 
Modernism. 

" No," you will answer me, " you mis- 
understand and calumniate us. We do not, 
indeed, choose to have Dives and Lazarus 
on our windows; but that is not because we 

are moderns, but because we are Protestants, 

N 



194 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

and do not like religious imagery. " Pardon 
me : that is not the reason. Go into any 
fashionable lady's boudoir in Paris, and see 
if you will find Dives and Lazarus there. 
You will find, indeed, either that she has her 
private chapel, or that she has a crucifix in 
her dressing-room; but for the general de- 
coration of the house, it is all composed of 
Apollos and Muses, just as it is here. 

1 1 8. Again. What do you suppose was 
the substance of good education, the education 
of a knight, in the Middle Ages ? What was 
taught to a boy as soon as he was able to 
learn anything? First, to keep under his 
body, and bring it into subjection and perfect 
strength ; then to take Christ for his captain, 
to live as always in His presence, and finally, 
to do his devoir — mark the word — to all men. 
Now consider, first, the difference in their in- 
fluence over the armies of France, between 
the ancient word " devoir," and modern word 
"gloire." And, again, ask yourselves what 
you expect your own children to be taught 
at your great schools and universities. Is it 
Christian history, or the histories of Pan 
and Silenus ? Your present education, to all 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 1 95 

intents and purposes, denies Christ, and that 
is intensely and peculiarly Modernism. 

119. Or, again, what do you suppose was 
the proclaimed and understood principle of all 
Christian governments in the Middle Ages ? 
I do not say it was a principle acted up to, 
or that the cunning and violence of wicked 
men had not too often their full sway then 
as now; but on what principles were that 
cunning and violence, so far as was possible, 
restrained ? By the confessed fear of God, 
and confessed authority of His law. You 
will find that all treaties, laws, transactions 
whatsoever, in .the Middle Ages, are based on 
a confession of Christianity as the leading 
rule of life ; that a text of Scripture is held, 
in all public assemblies, strong enough to be 
set against an appearance of expediency ; and 
although, in the end, the expediency might 
triumph, yet it was never without a distinct 
allowance of Christian principle, as an effi- 
cient element in the consultation. Whatever 
error might be committed, at least Christ was 
openly confessed. Now what is the custom 
of your British Parliament in these days ? 
You know that nothing would excite greater 



I96 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

manifestations of contempt and disgust than 
the slightest attempt to introduce the autho- 
rity of Scripture in a political consultation. 
That is denying Christ. It is intensely and 
peculiarly Modernism. 

120. It would be easy to go on showing 
you this same thing in many more instances ; 
but my business to-night is to show you its full 
effect in one thing only, namely, in art, and 
I must come straightway to that, as I have 
little enough time. This, then, is the great 
and broad fact which distinguishes modern art 
from old art ; that all ancient art was religious, 
and all modern art is profane. Once more, 
your patience for an instant. I say, all ancient 
art was religious ; that is to say, religion was 
its first object; private luxury or pleasure its 
second. I say all modern art is profane ; that 
is, private luxury or pleasure is its first ob- 
ject ; religion its second. Now you all know, 
that anything which makes religion its second 
object, makes religion no object. God will put 
up with a great many things in the human 
heart, but there is one thing He will not put 
up with in it — a second place. He who offers 
God a second place, offers Him no place. 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 1 97 

And there is another mighty truth which you 
all know, that he who makes religion his first 
object, makes it his whole object; he has no 
other work in the world than God's work. 
Therefore I do not say that ancient art was 
more religious than modern art. There is no 
question of degree in this matter. Ancient art 
was religious art ; modern art is profane art ; 
and between the two the distinction is as firm 
as between light and darkness. 

121. Now, do not let what I say be encum- 
bered in your minds with the objection, that 
you think art ought not to be brought into 
the service of religion-. That is not the ques- 
tion at present — do not agitate it. The simple 
fact is, that old art was brought into that 
service, and received therein a peculiar form ; 
that modern art is not brought into that ser- 
vice, and has received in consequence another 
form ; that this is the great distinction between 
mediaeval and modern art ; and from that are 
clearly deducible all other essential differences 
between them. That is the point I wish to 
show you, and of that there can be no dispute. 
Whether or not Christianity be the purer for 
lacking the service of art, is disputable — and 



I98 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

I do not mean now to begin the dispute ; but 
that art is the impurer for not being in the 
service of Christianity, is indisputable, and 
that is the main point I have now to do with. 

122. Perhaps there are some of you here 
who would not allow that the religion of the 
thirteenth century was Christianity. Be it so ; 
still is the statement true, which is all that is 
necessary for me now to prove, that art was 
great because it was devoted to such religion as 
then existed. Grant that Roman Catholicism 
was not Christianity — grant it, if you will, to 
be the same thing as old heathenism — and 
still I say to you, whatever it was, men lived 
and died by it, the ruling thought of all their 
thoughts; and just as classical art was great- 
est in building to its gods, so mediaeval art was 
great in building to its gods, and modern art 
is not great, because it builds to no God. You 
have, for instance, in your Edinburgh Library, 
a Bible of the thirteenth century, the Latin 
Bible, commonly known as the Vulgate. It 
contains the Old and New Testaments, com- 
plete, besides the books of Maccabees, the Wis- 
dom of Solomon, the books of Judith, Baruch, 
and Tobit. The whole is written in the most 
beautiful black-letter hand, and each book 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 1 99 

begins with an illuminated letter, containing 
three or four figures, illustrative of the book 
which it begins. Now, whether this were 
done in the service of true Christianity or not, 
the simple fact is, that here is a man's life- 
time taken up in writing and ornamenting a 
Bible, as the sole end of his art ; and that 
doing this, either in a book or on a wall, 
was the common artist's life at the time ; that 
the constant Bible reading and Bible thinking 
which this work involved, made a man serious 
and thoughtful, and a good workman, because 
he was always expressing those feelings which, 
whether right or wrong, were the groundwork 
of his whole being. Now, about the year 1 500, 
this entire system was changed. Instead of the 
life of Christ, men had, for the most part, to 
paint the lives of Bacchus and Venus ; and if 
you walk through any public gallery of pictures 
by the " great masters," as they are called, you 
will indeed find here and there what is called 
a Holy Family, painted for the sake of draw- 
ing pretty children, or a pretty woman; but 
for the most part you will find nothing but 
Floras, Pomonas, Satyrs, Graces, Bacchanals, 
and Banditti. Now, you will not declare — 



200 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

you cannot believe — that Angelico painting 
the life of Christ, Benozzo painting the life of 
Abraham, Ghirlandajo painting the life of the 
Virgin, Giotto painting the life of St. Francis, 
were worse employed, or likely to produce a 
less healthy art, than Titian painting the loves 
of Venus and Adonis, than Correggio painting 
the naked Antiope, than Salvator painting the 
slaughters of the thirty years' war ? If you 
will not let me call the one kind of labour 
Christian, and the other unchristian, at least you 
will let me call the one moral, and the other 
immoral, and that is all I ask you to admit. 

123. Now observe, hitherto I have been 
telling you what you may feel inclined to 
doubt or dispute ; and I must leave you to con- 
sider the subject at your leisure. But hence- 
forward I tell you plain facts, which admit 
neither of doubt nor dispute by any one who 
will take the pains to acquaint himself with 
their subject-matter. 

When the entire purpose of art was moral 
teaching, it naturally took truth for its first 
object, and beauty, and the pleasure resulting 
from beauty, only for its second. But when 
it lost all purpose of moral teaching, it as 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 201 

naturally took beauty for its first object, and 
truth for its second. 

That is to say, in all they did, the old artists 
endeavoured, in one way or another, to express 
the real facts of the subject or event, this being 
their chief business : and the question they 
first asked themselves was always, how would 
this thing, or that, actually have occurred? 
what would this person, or that, have done 
under the circumstances ? and then, having 
formed their conception, they work it out with 
only a secondary regard to grace or beauty, 
while a modern painter invariably thinks of the 
grace and beauty of his work first, and unites 
afterwards as much truth as he can with its 
conventional graces. I will give you a single 
strong instance to make my meaning plainer. 
In Orcagna's great fresco of the Triumph of 
Death, one of the incidents is that three kings,* 

* This incident is not of Orcagna's invention, it is vari- 
ously represented in much earlier art. There is a curious 
and graphic drawing of it, circa 1300, in the MS. Arundel 
83, Brit. Mus., in which the three dead persons are walking, 
and are met by three queens, who severally utter the sentences, 

" Ich am aferd." 

" Lo, whet ich se?" 

" Me thinketh hit beth develes thre." 
To which the dead bodies answer — 



202 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

when out hunting, are met by a spirit, which, 
desiring them to follow it, leads them to a 
churchyard, and points out to them, in open 
coffins, three bodies of kings such as them- 
selves, in the last stages of corruption. Now 
a modern artist, representing this, would have 
endeavoured dimly and faintly to suggest the 
appearance of the dead bodies, and would 
have made, or attempted to make, the coun- 
tenances of the three kings variously and 
solemnly expressive of thought. This would 
be in his, or our, view, a poetical and tasteful 
treatment of the subject. But Orcagna dis- 
dains both poetry and taste ; he wants the 
facts only ; he wishes to give the spectator the 
same lesson that the kings had ; and therefore, 
instead of concealing the dead bodies, he paints 
them with the most fearful detail. And then, 
he does not consider what the three kings 
might most gracefully do. He considers only 

" Ich wes wel fair." 
" Such scheltou be." 
" For Godes love, be wer by me." 

It is curious, that though the dresses of the living persons, 
and the " I was well fair" of the first dead speaker, seem to 
mark them distinctly to be women, some longer legends 
below are headed " primus rex mortuus," &c. 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 203 

what they actually in all probability ivould have 
done. He makes them looking at the coffins 
with a startled stare, and one holding his nose. 
This is an extreme instance ; but you are not 
to suppose it is because Orcagna had natur- 
ally a coarse or prosaic mind. Where he felt 
that thoughtfulness and beauty could properly 
be introduced, as in his circles of saints and 
prophets, no painter of the Middle Ages is so 
grand. I can give you no better proof of this, 
than the one fact that Michael Angelo borrowed 
from him openly — borrowed from him in the 
principal work which he ever executed, the 
Last Judgment, and borrowed from him the 
principal figure in that work. But it is just 
because Orcagna was so firmly and unscru- 
pulously true, that he had the power of being 
so great when he chose. His arrow went 
straight to the mark. It was not that he did 
not love beauty, but he loved truth first. 

124. So it was with all the men of that time. 
No painters ever had more power of conceiving 
graceful form, or more profound devotion to 
the beautiful ; but all these gifts and affections 
are kept sternly subordinate to their moral 
purpose ; and, so far as their powers and 



204 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

knowledge went, they either painted from 
nature things as they were, or from imagina- 
tion things as they must have been. 

I do not mean that they reached any imitative 
resemblance to nature. They had neither skill 
to do it, nor care to do it. Their art was con- 
ventional and imperfect, but they considered 
it only as a language wherein to convey the 
knowledge of certain facts ; it was perfect 
enough for that ; and though always reaching 
on to greater attainments, they never suffered 
their imperfections to disturb and check them 
in their immediate purposes. And this mode 
of treating all subjects was persisted in by the 
greatest men until the close of the fifteenth 
century. 

125. Now so justly have the Pre-Raphaelites 
chosen their time and name, that the great 
change which clouds the career of mediaeval 
art was effected, not only in Raphael's time, 
but by RaphaePs own practice, and by his 
practice in the very centre of his available 
life. 

You remember, doubtless, what high ground 
we have for placing the beginning of human 
intellectual strength at about the age of twelve 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 205 

years.* Assume, therefore, this period for the 
beginning of Raphael's strength. He died at 
thirty-seven. And in his twenty-fifth year, 
one half-year only past the precise centre of 
his available life, he was sent for to Rome, 
to decorate the Vatican for Pope Julius II., and 
having until that time worked exclusively in 
the ancient and stern mediaeval manner, he, in 
the first chamber which he decorated in that 
palace, wrote upon its walls the Mene, Tekel, 
Upharsin of the Arts of Christianity. 

And he wrote it thus : On one wall of that 
chamber he placed a picture of the World or 
Kingdom of Theology, presided over by Christ. 
And on the side wall of that same chamber he 
placed the World or Kingdom of Poetry, pre- 
sided over by Apollo. And from that spot, 
and from that hour, the intellect and the art 
of Italy date their degradation. 

126. Observe, however, the significance of 
this fact is not in the mere use of the figure 
of the heathen god to indicate the domain of 
poetry. Such a symbolical use had been made 
of the figures of heathen deities in the best 
times of Christian art. But it is in the fact, 

* Luke ii. 42, 49. 



206 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

that being called to Rome especially to adorn 
the palace of the so-called head of the Church, 
and called as the chief representative of the 
Christian artists of his time, Raphael had 
neither religion nor originality enough to trace 
the spirit of poetry and the spirit of philosophy 
to the inspiration of the true God, as well as 
that of theology ; but that, on the contrary, he 
elevated the creations of fancy on the one wall y 
to the same rank as the objects of faith upon 
the other ; that in deliberate, balanced opposi- 
tion to the Rock of the Mount Zion, he reared 
the rock of Parnassus, and the rock of the 
Acropolis; that, among the masters of poetry 
we find him enthroning Petrarch and Pindar, 
but not Isaiah nor David, and for lords over 
the domain of philosophy we find the masters 
of the school of Athens, but neither of those 
greater masters, by the last of whom that 
school was rebuked, — those who received their 
wisdom from heaven itself, in the vision of 
Gibeon,* and the lightning of Damascus. 

127. The doom of the arts of Europe went 
forth from that chamber, and it was brought 
about in great part by the very excellencies of 

* I Kings iii. 5. 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 2Q>*] 

the man who had thus marked the commence- 
ment of decline. The perfection of execution 
and the beauty of feature which were attained 
in his works, and in those of his great con- 
temporaries, rendered finish of execution and 
beauty of form the chief objects of all artists; 
and thenceforward execution was looked for 
rather than thought, and beauty rather than 
veracity. 

And as I told you, these are the two secon- 
dary causes of the decline of art ; the first 
being the loss of moral purpose. Pray note 
them clearly. In mediaeval art, thought is the 
first thing, execution the second; in modern 
art execution is the first thing, and thought 
the second. And again, in mediaeval art, truth 
is first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty 
is first, truth second. The mediaeval principles 
led up to Raphael, and the modern principles 
lead down from him. 

128. Now, first, let me give you a familiar 
illustration of the difference with respect to 
execution. Suppose you have to teach two 
children drawing, one thoroughly clever and 
active-minded, the other dull and slow; and 
you put before them Jullien's chalk studies 



208 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

of heads — etudes a deux crayons — and desire 
them to be copied. The dull child will slowly 
do your bidding, blacken his paper and rub 
it white again, and patiently and painfully, 
in the course of three or four years, attain to 
the performance of a chalk head, not much 
worse than his original, but still of less value 
than the paper it is drawn upon. But the 
clever child will not, or will only by force, con- 
sent to this discipline. He finds other means 
of expressing himself with his pencil somehow 
or another; and presently you find his paper 
covered with sketches of his grandfather and 
grandmother, and uncles, and cousins — sketches 
of the room, and the house, and the cat, and 
the dog, and the country outside, and every- 
thing in the world he can set his eyes on; 
and he gets on, and even his child's work has 
a value in it — a truth which makes it worth 
keeping ; no one knows how precious, perhaps, 
that portrait of his grandfather may be, if any 
one has but the sense to keep it till the time 
when the old man can be seen no more up the 
lawn, nor by the wood. That child is working 
in the Middle- Age spirit — the other in the 
modern spirit. 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 209 

129. But there is something still more strik- 
ing in the evils which have resulted from the 
modern regardlessness of truth. Consider, for 
instance, its effect on what is called historical 
painting. What do you at present mean by 
historical painting ? Now-a-days it means the 
endeavouring, by the power of imagination, 
to portray some historical event of past days. 
But in the Middle Ages, it meant representing 
the acts of their own days; and that is the 
only historical painting worth a straw. Of all 
the wastes of time and sense which Modernism 
has invented — and they are many — none are 
so ridiculous as this endeavour to represent 
past history. What do you suppose our de- 
scendants will care for our imaginations of the 
events of former days ? Suppose the Greeks, 
instead of representing their own warriors as 
they fought at Marathon, had left us nothing 
.but their imaginations of Egyptian battles; 
and suppose the Italians, in like manner, in- 
stead of portraits of Can Grande and Dante, or 
of Leo the Tenth and Raphael, had left us 
nothing but imaginary portraits of Pericles 
and Miltiades ? What fools we should have 

thought them ! how bitterly we should have 

O 



2IO ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

been provoked with their folly ! And that 
is precisely what our descendants will feel 
towards us, so far as our grand historical 
and classical schools are concerned. What 
do we care, they will say, what those nine- 
teenth century people fancied about Greek 
and Roman history ! If they had left us a 
few plain and rational sculptures and pictures 
of their own battles, and their own men, in 
their everyday dress, we should have thanked 
them. "Well, but," you will say, "we have 
left them portraits of our great men, and paint- 
ings of our great battles." Yes, you have 
indeed, and that is the only historical paint- 
ing that you either have, or can have; but 
you don't call that historical painting. You 
don't thank the men who do it; you look 
down upon them and dissuade them from it, 
and tell them they don't belong to the grand 
schools. And yet they are the only true his- 
torical painters, and the only men who will 
produce any effect on their own generation, or 
on any other. Wilkie was a historical painter, 
Chantrey a historical sculptor, because they 
painted, or carved, the veritable things and 
men they saw, not men and things as they 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 2 1 1 

believed they might have been, or should 
have been. But no one tells such men they 
are historical painters, and they are discon- 
tented with what they do; and poor Wilkie 
must needs travel to see the grand school, 
and imitate the grand school, and ruin him- 
self. And you have had multitudes of other 
painters ruined, from the beginning, by that 
grand school. There was Etty, naturally as 
good a painter as ever lived, but no one told 
him what to paint, and he studied the antique, 
and the grand schools, and painted dances of 
nymphs in red and yellow shawls to the end 
of his days. Much good may they do you ! 
He is gone to the grave, a lost mind. There 
was Flaxman, another naturally great man, 
with as true an eye for nature as Raphael, 
— he stumbles over the blocks of the antique 
statues — wanders in the dark valley of their 
ruins to the end of his days. He has left 
you a few outlines of muscular men straddling 
and frowning behind round shields. Much 
good may they do you ! Another lost mind. 
And of those who are lost namelessly, who 
have not strength enough even to make them- 
selves known, the poor pale students who lie 



212 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

buried for ever in the abysses of the great 
schools, no account can be rendered ; they are 
numberless. 

130. And the wonderful thing is, that of all 
these men whom you now have come to call 
the great masters, there was not one who con- 
fessedly did not paint his own present world, 
plainly and truly. Homer sang of what he 
saw; Phidias carved what he saw; Raphael 
painted the men of his own time in their own 
caps and mantles; and every man who has 
arisen to eminence in modern times has done 
so altogether by his working in their way, and 
doing the things he saw. How did Reynolds 
rise ? Not by painting Greek women, but 
by painting the glorious little living Ladies 
this, and Ladies that, of his own time. How 
did Hogarth rise ? Not by painting Athenian 
follies, but London follies. Who are the men 
who have made an impression upon you your- 
selves — upon your own age ? I suppose the 
most popular painter of the day is Landseer. 
Do you suppose he studied dogs and eagles 
out of the Elgin Marbles ? And yet in the 
very face of these plain, incontrovertible, all- 
visible facts, we go on from year to year with 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 213 

the base system of Academy teaching, in spite 
of which every one of these men has risen : I 
say in spite of the entire method and aim of our 
art-teaching. It destroys the greater number of 
its pupils altogether ; it hinders and paralyses 
the greatest. There is not a living painter 
whose eminence is not in spite of everything 
he has been taught from his youth upwards, 
and who, whatever his eminence may be, has 
not suffered much injury in the course of his 
victory. For observe : this love of what is 
called ideality or beauty in preference to truth, 
operates not only in making us choose the 
past rather than the present for our subjects, 
but it makes us falsify the present when we 
do take it for our subject. I said just now 
that portrait-painters were historical painters ; 
— so they are ; but not good ones, because not 
faithful ones. The beginning and end of mo- 
dern portraiture is adulation. The painters 
cannot live but by flattery ; we should desert 
them if they spoke honestly. And therefore 
we can have no good portraiture; for in the 
striving after that which is not in their model, 
they lose the inner and deeper nobleness which 
is in their model. I saw not long ago, for 



214 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

the first time, the portrait of a man whom 
I knew well — a young man, but a religious 
man — and one who had suffered much from 
sickness. The whole dignity of his features 
and person depended upon the expression of 
serene, yet solemn, purpose sustaining a feeble 
frame; and the painter, by way of flattering 
him, strengthened him, and made him athletic 
in body, gay in countenance, idle in gesture; 
and the whole power and being of the man 
himself were lost. And this is still more the 
case with our public portraits. You have a 
portrait, for instance, of the Duke of Welling- 
ton at the end of the North Bridge — one of 
the thousand equestrian statues of Modernism 
— studied from the show-riders of the amphi- 
theatre, with their horses on their hind-legs 
in the saw-dust.* Do you suppose that was 

* I intended this last sentence of course to apply to the 
thousand statues, not definitely to the one in immediate 
question, which, though tainted with the modern affecta- 
tion, and the nearest example of it to which I could refer 
an Edinburgh audience, is the work of a most promising 
sculptor ; and was indeed so far executed on the principles 
asserted in the text, that the Duke gave Mr. Steele a sitting 
on horseback, in order that his mode of riding might be 
accurately represented. This, however, does not render the 
following remarks in the text nugatory, as it may easily be 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 2 I 5 

the way the Duke sat when your destinies 
depended on him ? when the foam hung from 
the lips of his tired horse, and its wet limbs 
were dashed with the bloody slime of the 
battle-field, and he himself sat anxious in his 
quietness, grieved in his fearlessness, as he 
watched, scythe-stroke by scythe-stroke, the 
gathering in of the harvest of death ? You 



imagined that the action of the Duke, exhibiting his riding 
in his own grounds, would be different from his action, or 
inaction, when watching the course of a battle. 

I must also make a most definite exception in favour of 
Marochetti, who seems to me a thoroughly great sculptor ; 
and whose statue of Cceur de Lion, though, according to 
the principle just stated, not to be considered a historical 
work, is an ideal work of the highest beauty and value. Its 
erection in front of Westminster Hall will tend more to 
educate the public eye and mind with respect to art, than 
anything we have done in London for centuries. 



April 2 1st 1854. — I stop the press in order to insert the 
following paragraph from to-day's Times: — " The Statue 
of Cceur De Lion. — Yesterday morning a number of work- 
men were engaged in pulling down the cast which was placed 
in New Palace Yard of the colossal equestrian statue of 
Richard Cozur de Lion. Sir C. Barry was, we believe, 
opposed to the cast remaining there any longer, and to the 
putting up of the statue itself on the same site, because it 
did not harmonise with the building. During the day the 
horse and figure were re?)ioved, and before night the pedestal 
was demolished and taken away. " 



2l6 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

would have done something had you thus left 
his image in the enduring iron, but nothing 
now. 

131. But the time has at last come for all 
this to be put an end to; and nothing can 
well be more extraordinary than the way in 
which the men have risen who are to do it. 
Pupils in the same schools, receiving precise- 
ly the same instruction which for so long a 
time has paralysed every one of our painters, 
— these boys agree in disliking to copy the 
antique statues set before them. They copy 
them as they are bid, and they copy them 
better than any one else ; they carry off prize 
after prize, and yet they hate their work. At 
last they are admitted to study from the life; 
they find the life very different from the an- 
tique, and say so. Their teachers tell them 
the antique is the best, and they mustn't copy 
the life. They agree among themselves that 
they like the life, and that copy it they will. 
They do copy it faithfully, and their mas- 
ters forthwith declare them to be lost men. 
Their fellow-students hiss them whenever they 
enter the room. They can't help it; they join 
hands and tacitly resist both the hissing and 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 217 

the instruction. Accidentally, a few prints of 
the works of Giotto, a few casts from those 
of Ghiberti, fall into their hands, and they 
see in these something they never saw before 
— something intensely and everlastingly true. 
They examine farther into the matter; they 
discover for themselves the greater part of 
what I have laid before you to-night; they 
form themselves into a body, and enter upon 
that crusade which has hitherto been victorious. 
And which will be absolutely and triumphantly 
victorious. The great mistake which has 
hitherto prevented the public mind from fully 
going with them must soon be corrected. 
That mistake was the supposition that, instead 
of wishing to recur to the principles of the 
early ages, these men wished to bring back 
the ignorance of the early ages. This notion, 
grounded first on some hardness in their 
earlier works, which resulted — as it must al- 
ways result — from the downright and earnest 
effort to paint nature as in a looking-glass, 
was fostered partly by the jealousy of their 
beaten competitors, and partly by the pure, 
perverse, and hopeless ignorance of the whole 
body of art-critics, so called, connected with 



2l8 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

the press. No notion was ever more baseless 
or more ridiculous. It was asserted that the 
Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well, in the face 
of the fact, that the principal member of their 
body, from the time he entered the schools 
of the Academy, had literally encumbered 
himself with the medals given as prizes for 
drawing. It was asserted that they did not 
draw in perspective, by men who themselves 
knew no more of perspective than they did 
of astrology ; it was asserted that they sinned 
against the appearances of nature, by men 
who had never drawn so much as a leaf or 
a blossom from nature in their lives. And, 
lastly, when all these calumnies or absurdities 
would tell no more, and it began to be forced 
upon men's unwilling belief that the style of 
the Pre-Raphaelites was true and was accord- 
ing to nature, the last forgery invented re- 
specting them is, that they copy photographs. 
You observe how completely this last piece of 
malice defeats all the rest. It admits they are 
true to nature, though only that it may deprive 
them of all merit in being so. But it may 
itself be at once refuted by the bold challenge 
to their opponents to produce a Pre-Raphaelite 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 2 1 9 

picture, or anything like one, by themselves 
copying a photograph. 

132. Let me at once clear your minds from 
all these doubts, and at once contradict all 
these calumnies. 

Pre-Raphaelitism has but one principle, 
that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all 
that it does, obtained by working everything, 
down to the most minute detail, from nature, 
and from nature only.* Every Pre-Raphaelite 
landscape background is painted to the last 
touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. 
Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied 
in expression, is a true portrait of some living 
person. Every minute accessory is painted in 
the same manner. And one of the chief reasons 
for the violent opposition with which the school 
has been attacked by other artists, is the enor- 
mous cost of care and labour which such a 
system demands from those who adopt it, in 

* Or, where imagination is necessarily trusted to, by always 
endeavouring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have 
happened, rather than as it most prettily might have happened. 
The various members of the school are not all equally severe 
in carrying out its principles, some of them trusting their 
memory or fancy very far ; only all agreeing in the effort to 
make their memories so accurate as to seem like portraiture, 
and their fancy so probable as to seem like memory. 



220 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

contradistinction to the present slovenly and 
imperfect style. 

133. This is the main Pre-Raphaelite prin- 
ciple. But the battle which its supporters have 
to fight is a hard one ; and for that battle they 
have been fitted by a very peculiar character. 

You perceive that the principal resistance 
they have to make is to that spurious beauty, 
whose attractiveness had tempted men to for- 
get, or to despise, the more noble quality of 
sincerity : and in order at once to put them 
beyond the power of temptation from this 
beauty, they are, as a body, characterised by 
a total absence of sensibility to the ordinary 
and popular forms of artistic gracefulness; 
while, to all that still lower kind of prettiness, 
which regulates the disposition of our scenes 
upon the stage, and which appears in our 
lower art, as in our annuals, our common- 
place portraits, and statuary, the Pre-Raphael- 
ites are not only dead, but they regard it with 
a contempt and aversion approaching to dis- 
gust. This character is absolutely necessary 
to them in the present time ; but it, of course, 
occasionally renders their work comparatively 
unpleasing. As the school becomes less 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 221 

aggressive, and more authoritative — which it 
will do — they will enlist into their ranks men 
who will work, mainly, upon their principles, 
and yet embrace more of those characters 
which are generally attractive, and this great 
ground of offence will be removed. 

134. Again: you observe that as landscape 
painters, their principles must, in great part, 
confine them to mere foreground work; and 
singularly enough, that they may not be 
tempted away from this work, they have been 
born with comparatively little enjoyment of 
those evanescent effects and distant sublimities 
which nothing but the memory can arrest, 
and nothing but a daring conventionalism por- 
tray. But for this work they are not now 
needed. Turner, the first and greatest of the 
Pre-Raphaelites, has done it already; he, 
though his capacity embraced everything, and 
though he would sometimes, in his fore- 
grounds, paint the spots upon a dead trout, 
and the dyes upon a butterfly's wing, yet 
for the most part delighted to begin at that 
very point where the other branches of Pre- 
Raphaelitism become powerless. 

135. Lastly. The habit of constantly carry- 
ing everything up to the utmost point of 



222 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

completion deadens the Pre-Raphaelites in 
general to the merits of men who, with an 
equal love of truth up to a certain point, yet 
express themselves habitually with speed and 
power, rather than with finish, and give ab- 
stracts of truth rather than total truth. Pro- 
bably to the end of time artists will more or 
less be divided into these cla'sses, and it will 
be impossible to make men like Millais under- 
stand the merits of men like Tintoret; but 
this is the more to be regretted because the Pre- 
Raphaelites have enormous powers of imagi- 
nation, as well as of realisation, and do not yet 
themselves know of how much they would be 
capable, if they sometimes worked on a larger 
scale, and with a less laborious finish. 

136. With all their faults, their pictures are, 
since Turner's death, the best — incomparably 
the best — on the walls of the Royal Academy ; 
and such works as Mr. Hunt's "Claudio and Isa- 
bella" have never been rivalled, in some respects 
never approached, at any other period of art. 

This I believe to be a most candid statement 
of all their faults and all their deficiencies ; not 
such, you perceive, as are likely to arrest 
their progress. The " magna est Veritas " was 
never more sure of accomplishment than by 



IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 223 

these men. Their adversaries have no chance 
with them. They will gradually unite their 
influence with whatever is true or powerful in 
the reactionary art of other countries ; and on 
their works such a school will be founded as 
shall justify the third age of the world's civilisa- 
tion, and render it as great in creation as it 
has been in discovery. 

137. And now let me remind you but of one 
thing more. As you examine into the career 
of historical painting, you will be more and 
more struck with the fact I have this evening 
stated to you, — that none was ever truly great 
but that which represented the living forms and 
daily deeds of the people among whom it arose; 
— that all precious historical work records, not 
the past, but the present. Remember, there- 
fore, that it is not so much in buying pictures, 
as in being pictures, that you can encourage a 
noble school. The best patronage of art is not 
that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment 
in a vague ideality, nor for beauty of form in a 
marble image; but that which educates your 
children into living heroes, and binds down the 
flights and the fondnesses of the heart into 
practical duty and faithful devotion. 



ADDENDA 



THE FOURTH LECTURE. 

138. I COULD not enter, in a popular lecture, 
upon one intricate and difficult question, closely 
connected with the subject of Pre-Raphaelitism 
— namely, the relation of invention to observa- 
tion ; and composition to imitation. It is still 
less a question to be discussed in the compass 
of a note ; and I must defer all careful examina- 
tion of it to a future opportunity. Nevertheless, 
it is impossible to leave altogether unanswered 
the first objection which is now most commonly 
made to the Pre-Raphaelite work, namely, that 
the principle of it seems adverse to all exertion 
of imaginative power. Indeed, such an objec- 
tion sounds strangely on the lips of a public 
who have been in the habit of purchasing, for 
hundreds of pounds, small squares of Dutch 



ADDENDA TO LECT. IV. 225 

canvas, containing only servile imitations of 
the coarsest nature. It is strange that an 
imitation of a cow's head by Paul Potter, or of 
an old woman's by Ostade, or of a scene of 
tavern debauchery by Teniers, should be pur- 
chased and proclaimed for high art, while the 
rendering of the most noble expressions of 
human feeling in Hunt's " Isabella," or of the 
loveliest English landscape, haunted by sor- 
row, in Millais' " Ophelia," should be declared 
" puerile." But, strange though the utterance 
of it be, there is some weight in the objection. 
It is true that so long as the Pre-Raphael- 
ites only paint from nature, however carefully 
selected and grouped, their pictures can never 
have the characters of the highest class of com- 
positions. But, on the other hand, the shallow 
and conventional arrangements commonly called 
"compositions" by the artists of the present 
day, are infinitely farther from great art than 
the most patient work of the Pre-Raphaelites. 
That work is, even in its humblest form, a 
secure foundation, capable of infinite super- 
structure ; a reality of true value, as far as it 
reaches, while the common artistical effects and 
groupings are a vain effort at superstructure 



226 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

without foundation — utter negation and fallacy 
from beginning to end. 

139. But more than this, the very faithful- 
ness of the Pre-Raphaelites arises from the 
redundance of their imaginative power. Not 
only can all the members of the school com- 
pose a thousand times better than the men 
who pretend to look down upon them, but I 
question whether even the greatest men of 
old times possessed more exhaustless inven- 
tion than either Millais or Rossetti ; and it is 
partly the very ease with which they invent 
which leads them to despise invention. Men 
who have no imagination, but have learned 
merely to produce a spurious resemblance of 
its results by the recipes of composition, are 
apt to value themselves mightily on their con- 
coctive science ; but the man whose mind a 
thousand living imaginations haunt, every hour, 
is apt to care too little for them ; and to long 
for the perfect truth which he finds is not to 
be come at so easily. And though I may 
perhaps hesitatingly admit that it is possible 
to love this truth of reality too intensely, yet 
I have no hesitation in declaring that there 
is no hope for those who despise it, and that 



ADDENDA TO LECT. IV. 227 

the painter, whoever he be, who despises the 
pictures already produced by the Pre-Raphael- 
ites, has himself no capacity of becoming 
a great painter of any kind. Paul Veronese 
and Tintoret themselves, without desiring to 
imitate the Pre-Raphaelite work, would have 
looked upon it with deep respect, as John 
Bellini looked on that of Albert Diirer; none 
but the ignorant could be unconscious of its 
truth, and none but the insincere regardless 
of it. 

140. How far it is possible for men edu- 
cated on the severest Pre-Raphaelite principles 
to advance from their present style into that 
of the great schools of composition, I do not 
care to inquire, for at this period such an 
advance is certainly not desirable. Of great 
compositions we have enough, and more than 
enough, and it would be well for the world 
if it were willing to take some care of those 
it has. Of pure and manly truth, of stern 
statement of the things done and seen around 
us daily, we have hitherto had nothing. And 
in art, as in all other things, besides the 
literature of which it speaks, that sentence of 
Carlyle is inevitably and irreversibly true : — 



228 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

" Day after day, looking at the high destinies 
which yet await literature, which literature 
will ere long address herself with more de- 
cisiveness than ever to fulfil, it grows clearer 
to us that the proper task of literature lies 
in the domain of BELIEF, within which, poetic 
fiction, as it is charitably named, will have to 
take a quite new figure, if allowed a settle- 
ment there. Whereby were it not reasonable 
to prophesy that this exceeding great multi- 
tude of novel writers and such like, must, in 
a new generation, gradually do one of two 
things, either retire into nurseries, and work 
for children, minors, and semifatuous persons 
of both sexes, or else, what were far better, 
sweep their novel fabric into the dust cart, 
and betake them, with such faculty as they 
have, to understand and record what is true, 
of which surely there is and for ever will be 
a whole infinitude unknown to us, of infinite 
importance to us ? Poetry will more and more 
come to be understood as nothing but higher 
knowledge, and the only genuine Romance for 
grown persons, Reality." 

141. As I was copying this sentence, a 
pamphlet was put into my hand, written by a 



ADDENDA TO LECT. IV. 229 

clergyman, denouncing " Woe, woe, woe ! to 
exceedingly young men of stubborn instincts, 
calling themselves Pre-Raphaelites." * 

I thank God that the Pre-Raphaelites are 
young, and that strength is still with them, 
and life, with all the war of it, still in front 
of them. Yet Everett Millais is this year of 
the exact age at which Raphael painted the 
" Disputa," his greatest work ; Rossetti and 
Hunt are both of them older still — nor is there 
one member of the body so young as Giotto, 
when he was chosen from among the painters 
of Italy to decorate the Vatican. But Italy, 
in her great period, knew her great men, 
and did not "despise their youth." It is re- 
served for England to insult the strength of 
her noblest children — to wither their warm 
enthusiasm early into the bitterness of patient 
battle, and leave to those whom she should 
have cherished and aided, no hope but in 
resolution, no refuge but in disdain. 

142. Indeed it is woeful, when the young 

* Art, its Constitution and Capacities, &c. By the Rev. 
Edward Young, M.A. The phrase " exceedingly young 
men of stubborn instincts," being twice quoted (carefully ex- 
cluding the context) from my pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism. 



23O ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING. 

usurp the place, or despise the wisdom, of the 
aged; and among the many dark signs of 
these times, the disobedience and insolence of 
youth are among the darkest. But with whom 
is the fault? Youth never yet lost its mo- 
desty where age had not lost its honour; nor 
did childhood ever refuse its reverence, except 
where age had forgotten correction. The 
cry, " Go up, thou bald head," will never be 
heard in the land which remembers the pre- 
cept, "See that ye despise not one of these 
little ones;" and although indeed youth may 
become despicable, when its eager hope is 
changed into presumption, and its progressive 
power into. arrested pride, there is something 
more despicable still, in the old age which 
has learned neither judgment nor gentleness, 
which is weak without charity, and cold with- 
out discretion. 



INDEX. 



INDEX. 



( The refere?ices are made to the numbei'ed paragraphs of this 
edition, A small n following a number signifies footnote to 
the paragraph.) 

Abbeville, street architecture, 18 ; St. Wulfran facade and 
porches, 67, and n. 

Abraham, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli, 122. 

Academy, Royal, exhibition, 103, 104, 136 ; schools, 130, 131 ; 
Turner, Haydon, and the R.A., 102. 

Adam's " new arrangement of his nature," 113. 

Addison felt no delight in sublime nature, 90. 

^Eolus, " paltry fable," 78, and n. 

iEschylus, had some feeling for landscape, 78 ; anticipated 
Shakspeare, 101. 

Age, its duties, 142. 

Agincourt, battle, 31. 

Alpine towers, 20 ; bridge, 58. 

Alps of St. Gothard, 1. 

Amiens Cathedral : apse and porch, 18 ; tower, 19 ; niche, 39 
and fig. 16 ; scientific construction, 58 ; facade, 67. 

Angelico, Fra, 122. 

Antiope, painted by Correggio, 122. 

Antwerp, street architecture, 18 ; tower, 21. 

Apennines, 20. 

Apollo, painted by Raphael, 125. 

Arabia, mountain scenery, 79. 

Arch, pointed, the strongest and most beautiful form of con- 
struction, 8 ; nobler than lintel and round arch, 58 n ; its 
very name suggests romance, 23 ; its importance in Gothic 
233 



234 INDEX. 

design, 18 ; why it is beautiful, 13 ; should be used for 
modern doors and windows, 15 ; how to adapt it to modern 
needs, 27 ; an example, 52, fig. 19. 

Architect should be an all-round artist like Giotto, Preface, 61 ; 
and as such taught by Deity, 60; the temper of early 
Gothic architects, 14 ; not to be had for hire, 2 ; the 
moderns are blinded by their traditions, 54, 57 ; are mere 
copyists, not true architects, and must begin anew with 
designing detail, 64. (See also Artist, Barry, Blank, Giotto, 
Huggins, Michael Angelo, Papworth, Phidias, Pugin, Tur- 
ner {Hudson) , Workman. ) 

Architecture : (Aa) Ancient Greek ; better than modern pseudo- 
Greek, 36, 63 ; characteristics, 6 ; its severe rules applied to 
ash-leaves, 8. (See Parthenon, Phidias.) 
(Ab) Pseudo-Greek or modern Renaissance : at Edinburgh, 1 ; 
uninteresting because monotonous, 3, 4 ; and basely imita- 
tive, 24, 73. It requires costly but valueless accessories, as 
balustrades, 34, and friezes, 35. Its ornament is misplaced, 
34» 35» 67 ; wrongly finished, 40 ; and meaningless, 41 ; 
or else unchristian, 117 ; and immoral, 122. Its only virtue 
is the most elementary "proportion," 63 ; it is often culpably 
insecure, 7 ; destroys the life and liberty of the workman, 
3 8 » 74» 75 I typifies Pride and Fear of Death, 75 ; doomed to 
speedy neglect, 76. (See Army and Navy Club, George 
Street, Mound, Picardy Place, York Place. ) 
(Ba) Ancient Roman: characteristics, 6; gabled windows, 7. 

(See Arch, Colosseum, Cloaca Maxima.) 
(Bb) Romanesque, Saxon, Norman: character, 6; nobler in 
construction than Greek, 58 ; method of obtaining rich 
effect, 67. (See Lombardic, Venice, Verona.) 
(Ca) Mediaeval Gothic : character, 6 ; easy to understand, 5 ; 
interesting, 4 ; romantic, 22, 23. It resembles nature in its 
principles, 8 ; was developed logically from domestic building, 
21, 22 ; the earliest and best was French, 21. 

Its construction nobler than the Greek, 58 ; two principal 
elements (see Arch and Gable) combine to form its features, 
18, 21, 25 (see Apse, Porch, Spire). 

Its design offers more opportunities for fine proportion than 
the Greek, 63 (see Cathedral, Proportion). 

Its decoration nobler than the Greek, 74 ; largely based on 
leaf form, 14 ; adapted to its position, and therefore econo- 
mical, 34, 67 ; example at Lyons, 37, figs. 13, 15 ; rightly 



INDEX. 235 

finished, 40 ; significant and naturalistic, 41 ; rich, 52 and 
fig. 19 ; inlaid with coloured stone, 53 (see Decoration). 

How far it expressed religion, 19-22 n. Its good effect on 
the workman, 74, 76. It trusted the public to preserve it, 
6jn. (See Abbeville, Amiens, Bayeux, Beauvais, Brussels, 
Burgos, Carlow, Coutances, Dunblane, Florence, Fribourg, 
Ghent, Glasgow, Holyrood, Holy Island, Lichfield, Lin- 
lithgow, Lucca, Lyons, Melrose, Milan, Normandy, Oak- 
ham, Paris, Peterborough, Picardy , Rheims, Roslin, Rouen, 
Salisbury, Strasbourg, Venice, Verona, Wells, West- 
minster. ) 
(Cb) Base modern Gothic of Milan Cathedral, 67. 
(Da) General principles : relation to scenery, 1 ; to art in 
general, 60 ; to sculpture, 61 ; begins but does not end in 
Proportion, 63 ; is tested by the quality of its detail, 64. It 
must not sacrifice use to beauty, 14, 59 ; though it may 
superadd beauty to use, 66. It must not be a mere imita- 
tion of ancient models, 55. 
The author's six theses on architecture, 57-74. 
Patronage means not payment but sympathy, 2 ; architec- 
ture is an art for all to learn, and easy to understand, 5. 
(Db) Domestic : capabilities of domestic architecture, 3, 4 ; 
the best originates in it, 21, 22 ; the cottage, 16. 

How to get a perfect school, 26, 27, 48, 49, 55; not a 
Utopian ideal, nor even expensive, 34, 51, 52. It should 
consist in brick and stone, not iron or glass, 28 ; should 
confess the importance of the roof, especially in northern 
climates, 17 ; it is permissible to mix styles, 55 (see Arch, 
Decoration, Gable, Porch, Window). The author's ideal 
sketched, 49. 

Architecture tells by accumulation, 2, 49 ; and permanence, 
50 ; and is a philanthropic art, 51. 

Architrave, 23. 

Aristophanes, landscape feeling, 78. 

Aristotle, 101. 

Army and Navy Club, London, frieze, 35. 

Art : absolutely right or wrong, 47 ; wrong when it pleases 
nobody, 4 ; it may be shown in jewellery, but better in archi- 
tecture, 51 ; no high or fine art in mere constructive archi- 
tecture, 60 ; all art involves proportion and disposition of 
masses, 63. Truth and conventionalism, 84. 



236 INDEX. 

Greek artists represented what they witnessed, 129 (and 
see Architecture, Sculpture), 

Christian art differs from pagan in spirituality of ex- 
pression and love of nature, 81 ; history of the transition, 
81 ; thirteenth century characteristics, 82, 1 14-124; the ages 
of thought, drawing, and painting, 83 ; some progress 
since Giotto's time, but more truly a radical change in 
temper, no ; history of the change, 126-127. 

Modern art is profane, ancient art was religious, 120 ; 
modern art is immoral, 122 ; and makes truth secondary to 
execution and beauty, 127. Pastoralism, 90, 94; romantic 
or Turneresque landscape, 93, 100 ; Academicism, 130 ; 
Pre-Raphaelitism, 131-142. (Sea Architecture, Decoration , 
Painting, Patronage, Sculpture.) 

Artist, influenced by his work, 122 ; mediaeval, aimed at truth 
first, 123. (See Painter, Workman.) 

Arthur's Seat, 1. 

Ash-leaves, 8 and figs. 4 and 5 ; caricatured on classic prin- 
ciples, 8, fig. 6. 

Association theory of beauty criticised, 10. 

romantic, of Gothic architecture, 22. 

Assyria, King of, 79. 

Athens, 114; "modern Athens," 42; Raphael's "school of 
Athens," 126. 

Author (A), personal ; counts windows in Edinburgh streets, 
3 ; visits scene of accident in Borough Road, Southwark, 7 ; 
lived for months in Gothic palaces, 27 ; called unpractical, 
but his suggestions adopted, 58 n ; said to dwell on "con- 
temptible details," 64 ; defends himself, 54, 57 ; has earned 
by fifteen years' study the right to "dogmatise," 101. 

(B), works. "Stones of Venice," a criticism and a reply, 

22 n ; vol. i. p. 129, on cusps, 58 n ; vol. i. p. 213 quoted, 68 ; 

vol. ii. chap, vi., on the life of the workman, 76; vol. iii. 

chaps, ii. and iii., on Pride of State and Fear of Death, 75 n. 

Pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism referred to, 141 n. 

11 Lectures on Architecture and Painting,"* printed nearly 

* Mr. T. J. Wise (Bibliography of Ruskin), says that these lectures 
were given to the Philosophical Institution, Queen Street Hall, Edin- 
burgh, on Nov. 1st, 4th, 15th, and 18th, 1853, respectively; that the first 
edition was published by Smith, Elder & Co., on April 18th, 1854, (but see 
130 «) ; the second on October 4th, 1855. To his account may be added 
that ed. 2 inserted the note to par. 105 (p. 186 of ed. 2, p. 179 of this ed.) 
in answer to a letter in the Atheruenm of June 10, 1854, denying the 



INDEX. 237 

as they were given, what omissions and additions, Preface ; 
Appendices, 53 ?z, 75, 79 w, 98, 130 n ; frontispiece by Millais, 
42 ; author's drawings copied on wood by Thurston Thomp- 
son, but some not reproduced to save expense, Preface. 
Author received Young's pamphlet against the Pre-Raphael- 
ites while copying par. 140, 141; dated preface, "Den- 
mark Hill, 16th April 1854," Preface; stopped press to 
add a paragraph, April 21st, 1854, 130 n. 

Authority no criterion of art, 54. 

Avignon, fresco by Giotto at, 85. 

Babylon, 75 ; Babylonish garment (Joshua vii. 21), 75. 

Balustrade, 34. 

Bannockburn, battle, 31. 

Barry, Sir C, architect, 130 n. 

Basilica, 20. 

Battlement, 22, 23. 

Bayard, Chevalier, 32. 

Bayeux Cathedral, 18 ; facade, 67. 

Beauty, the normal attribute of nature, 8, 11 ; not the effect of 
habituation, 9, 10 ; for association endears things and per- 
sons, but does not make them beautiful, 10. 

Perfect, is rare, 11 ; and involves complete fulfilment of 
natural law, e.g. sapphire, 12. 

Criteria of beauty in art, 13 ; must not be sought in archi- 
tecture at the expense _ of use, 14. In mediaeval painting, 
beauty was secondary to truth, 123 ; and so it is in Pre- 
Raphaelitism, 133. 

Beauvais spire, 19. 

Belfry, 19 ; a romantic word, 22 (see Campanile, Spire, Tower). 

Bellini, John, and Durer, 139. 

Ben Ledi and Ben More, i. 

Benozzo Gozzoli, 86, 122. 

Bereans (Acts xvii. 11), 54. 

anecdote, which was supposed by this critic to refer to William Fred- 
erick Wells of the Old Water-Colour Society. An important addition 
was made also on p. 230 (ed. 2), claiming Turner as the first and 
greatest Pre-Raphaelite. The published price of both editions was 
8s. 6d. ; the volume contained mezzotint frontispiece, and 14 pp. of 
woodcuts, which were placed together at the end. The same plate and 
blocks have been used for this, edition, and the same " Plates" inserted 
opposite to the references to them in the text, except the frontispiece, 
which remains where it was; the flaps to hide figs. 6 and 18 are now 
omitted, as they usually tore the plate, or were lost in bindings 



238 INDEX. 

Bethphage, 80. 

Bible, a safe court of appeal, 28 ; in what sense it is so, 56 ; 
appealed to by mediaeval statesmen, 119. Latin MS. in 
Edinburgh Library, 122 ; effect of Bible-reading on medi- 
aeval artist, 122. Delights in natural imagery, 79. 

Quoted or referred to : — 
Gen. xi. 4, " Let us build ... a tower" (Babel), 19. 
Deut. iii. 25, " Goodly mountain . . . Lebanon," 79. 
Joshua vii. 21, Babylonish garment, 75. 
Judges viii. 9, 17, Gideon at Penuel, 19. 
Judges ix. 46-49, Abimelech at Shechem, 19. 
Judges ix. 52, 53, Death of Abimelech at Thebez, 19. 
1 Kings iii. 5, Solomon's vision at Gibeon, 126. 

1 Kings iv. 33, " Hyssop that springeth out of the wall," 80. 

2 Kings ii. 23, " Go up, thou bald head," 142. 
Job i. 14, " The oxen were ploughing," 79. 

Job v. 23, " In league with the stones of the field," 79. 
Job vi. 15, " Deceitfully as a brook . . . blackish by reason 

of the ice," 79. 
Job viii. 16, 17, " His branch shooteth forth," 79. 
Job ix. 5, " He removeth the mountains," 79. 
Job ix. 30, " If I wash myself with snow water," 79. 
Job xiv. 18, " The mountain falling cometh to nought," 79. 
Job xxiv. 6-8, ■ ' They cause the naked to go without 

shelter " (covering), 25. 
Job xxiv. 19, "Drought and heat consume the snow 

waters," 79. 
Job xxviii. 19, " He cutteth out rivers among the rocks," 79. 
Ps. xli. 1, " Blessed is he that considereth the poor," 44. 
Ps. xlviii. 12, 13, " Tell the towers thereof," 19. 
Ps. cxiv. 3, " The sea saw it and fled," 79. 
Ps. cxix. 103, "Thy words . . . sweeter than honey," 56. 
Ps. cxli. 5, " Let the righteous . . . reprove me," 56. 
Cant. iii. 7, Guards of the bed of Solomon, 116. 
Cant. vii. 4, "Tower of Lebanon," 19. 
Cant. viii. 10, "I am a wall, and my breasts like towers," 19. 
Prov. xxiv. 12, " If thou sayest, Behold we knew it not," 45. 
Isa. xiv. 8, "Yea, the fir-trees rejoice," 79. 
Isa. liv. 11, 12, "I will lay thy stones of fair colours," 56. 
Isa. lviii. 7, " Bring the poor ... to thy house," 25. 
Jer. i. 18, "I have made thee ... an iron pillar," 28. 
Jer. viii. 22, " Balm in Gilead," 56. 



INDEX. 239 

Dan. v. 25, "Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," 125. 

Matt. vi. 28, " They toil not, neither do they spin," 79. 

Matt, xviii. 10, " Despise not one of these little ones," 142. 

Mark xi. 1, 2; Luke xxii. 39, Bethphage and ■ mount of 
Olives, 80. v 

Luke ii. 42-49, The age of twelve years, 125 n. 

Luke xiv. 28, "Intending to build a tower . . . counteth 
the cost," 28. 

Acts ix. 3, Paul's vision at Damascus, 126. 

Acts xvii. 11, Bereans, 54. 

Eph. ii. 20, The corner-stone, 28. 
Bird, artist, 103. 

Blank, the great Mr., type of modern architect, 24. 
Boldness of execution, good in decorative sculpture, 40. 
Bonaparte, 32. 

Bonifazio, Venetian painter, 87. 
Border towers, romantic, 22. 
Borgia, 75. 

Borough Road, South wark, fall of a house, 7. 
Borthwick tower, 22. 

Bourgtheroude, hotel of William de, 52 and fig. 19. 
Bow-window, see Window. 
Bracket at Lyons Cathedral, 37 and figs. 13, 15. 
British Museum, MS. (Arundel, 83), 123 n ; Egyptian lions, 84. 
Brundusium, Horace's journey to, 78. 
Brussels, street architecture, 18. 
Builder, The, architectural newspaper, quoted or referred to : 

— vol. xi. p. 690, Preface; vol. xi. p. 709, 6; 12 Jan. 1854, 

report of Mr. Huggins' lecture, 71 n ; 21 Jan. 1854, church 

at Carlow, 58 n ; 18 March 1854, Versailles, 75 n. 
Burgos, open-work spire, 21. 
Butter-tower at Rouen, 22 n. 
Byron, 32, 92. 

Caerlaverock Castle described in '■' Guy Mannering," 92. 
Campanile of Giotto, its building, Preface; various forms of 

Italian bell-towers, 20 and n. 
Can Grande, portrait, 129 (see Scaligeri). 
Canongate, Edinburgh, 1, 2, 33. 
Carlow, church, 58 n, 
Carlyle, Thomas, on truth in art, 140. 
Castle rock, Edinburgh, 1. 



24O INDEX. 

Cathedral, Gothic, its construction easy to understand, 5 ; f< de- 
finition" of, 61 : purpose of, 66. (See Amiens, Bayeux, Bur- 
gos, Coutances, Dunblane, Florence, Fribourg, Holy Island, 
Lichfield, Lyons \ Milan r Paris, Peterborough, Rheims, 
Rouen, Salisbury, Strasbourg, Verona, Wells.) 

Cervantes, 32. 

Chantrey, Sir Francis, sculptor, 129. 

Charity, duties of, 25, 44 (see Philanthropy). 

Christ, lived little in towns, 80 ; St. Louis had most perfect faith 
in, 112 ; moderns deny, 114, 117 ; the captain of mediaeval 
knight, 118 ; confessed by mediaeval statesmen, 119. 
Represented by Michael Angelo, 123 ; by Raphael, 125. 

Christian includes both honest Protestants and honest Roman 
Catholics, 115. 

Christian art sometimes uses heathen symbols, 126 (see Art, 
Christianity). 

Lord Lindsay's book quoted, Preface. 

Christianity encouraged spirituality in conception of human 
form, and love of nature, 81 ; its spirit shown sometimes 
in love of nature and in nothing else, 93 ; more vital in 
Middle Age than in modern, 112-119 ; "he who offers 
God a second place offers Him no place," 120 ; influence 
on art, 121. 

Clarendon, 116. 

Classical age, no, in ; an age of faith, 112, 114. 

art, (see Architecture, Art, Painting). 

Claude, landscapist, 88, 91, 97, 98, 99. 

Claudio and Isabella, picture by Mr. Holman Hunt, 136, 138. 

Cloaca Maxima at Rome, 22 n. 

Cloud painting of fifteenth century, 86 ; of sixteenth century, 87. 

Col du G^ant, 90. 

Cologne, Turner's picture, 104. 

Colosseum at Rome, 7. 

Colour of Giottesque landscape, 84 ; of fifteenth century, 86 ; 
of Titianesque, 87. (See Conventionalism, Decoration, 
Painting.) 

Commodus, Emperor, 31. 

Composition, illustrated, 37 ; and Pre-Raphaelitism, 139, 140. 
(See Proportion, Design, Decoration.) 

Conscience not always trustworthy, 32. 

Constantine, Emperor, 8i, 

Construction regulated by convenience, 22 n, 59; Gothic or 



INDEX. 241 

Romanesque nobler than Greek, 58 ; value of the cusp, 
58 n ; simplicity net always desirable, 58. Not the noblest 
thing in architecture, 59. (See Arch, Gable, Roof. } 

Conventionalism, its reasons and meaning, 68; "by cause of 
colour," 69; "by cause of inferiority," 70; "by cause of 
means," 71; in landscape, 84; means stopping short of 
nature, not falsifying it, 84 ; in mediaeval art, 124. 

Copying of pictures as means of study, not done by Turner, 
97. (See Imitation.) 

Cornice in wood, 18. 

Correggio as landscapist, 83, 87; his Antiope, 122. 

Cottages, their beauty is in the roof, 16. 

Coutances, towers, the earliest Gothic, 21 and fig. 11. 

Coxwold, Sterne's parish, 90. 

Craigmillar, 22. 

Crichtoun, 22. 

Crystal Palace, accident, 7. 

Cusp, constructive value, 58 n. 

Custom has no real influence on the sense of beauty, 10. (See 
A ssocia Hon , Bea uty. ) 

Cuyp, Dutch landscapist, 97. 

Cyclops, "paltry fable," 78, and n>. 

Damascus, Paul's vision, 126. 

Dante, 83; portrait, 89; Inferno III. 51, quoted, " guarda e 
passa," 94. 

David, King, a "master of poetry," 126. 

Decoration (Aa), classic : Greek and Egyptian employs not only 
plants but animals and figures, 71 ; in good work is 
adapted to distance from the eye, 36 : ancient classic better 
than modern imitations, 36, 63 ; old Greek style depends 
more on its grand figure sculpture than on its propor- 
tions, 63. 
(Ab) Pseudo-Greek or modern classic : monotonous, 3 ; mis- 
placed and costly, 34, 36 ; wrongly finished, 40 ; mean- 
ingless, 41 ; ridiculous, 42 ; lifeless, 73 ; impious, 117 ; 
immoral, r22. 

(B) Gothic: inexpensive, because adapted to position, 35, 
37» 39» an d fig. 16 ; rightly finished, 40 ; significant and true 
to nature, 41, 43, 81 ; didactic, 116, 117. Inlaid, 53. 

(C) General rules. It is the principal part of architec- 
ture, 59; like construction, and even more so, it involves 

Q 



242 INDEX. 

proportion, 63 ; and design or composition, 37. It must be 
adapted to position, giving effect of equal richness all over, 
67; but must be strengthened on the more interesting 
parts, 14. It must be based on natural form, 14, 68 ; 
plants, animals, and figures, 14, 43, 48, 71 ; though it must 
be conventionalised (see Conventionalism) and composed, 
37. It must be thoughtful, 72 ; and varied, for monotony 
marks the degradation of a style, except where it is a foil 
to variety, 73. (See Architecture, Painting, Sculpture.) 

Design ; " who cannot design small things, cannot design large 
ones," 64. (See Composition, Disposition, Proportion.) 

Detail, involves sense of proportion, 63, and design ; and is 
therefore a test of the architect's powers, 64. 

Devoir and gloire, 118. 

Disposition of masses (or composition) shown in small things as 
much as in large, 63 ; is the beginning of all art, but not its 
end, 63. 

Disputa del Sacramento, fresco of Raphael, 141. 

Dogtooth ornament developed into leaves, 14. 

Domestic architecture, see Architecture. 

Door, should have pointed arch, 15 ; inconveniences of modern 
front-door ; it should have a porch, 25. 

Dormer window, 18 ; see Garret, Window. 

Drawing, or draughtsmanship, defined, 83 ; the Age of draw- 
ing, 83. 

Dulness, sign of bad art, 4. 

Dumas, Alexandre, the elder, 93. 

Dunblane Abbey, west window, 14 and fig. 7. 

Duomo, see Florence, Verona. 

Diirer, Albert, 22, 139. 

Dutch painting, 138. 

Duty postulates practicability (I ought, therefore I can), 45 ; 
duty of old age, 142. 

Edinburgh, fine site for architecture, 1 ; consists not in such 
and such public buildings, but in the aggregate of private 
houses, 2 ; the New Town appreciated, 1 ; criticised, 3. 
Style of decoration poor, 37, and pagan, 117. MS. in 
Library, 122. (See Arthurs Seat, Athens, Blank, Canon- 
gate, Castle Rock, Firth of Forth, George Street, High Street, 
Holy rood, Mound, New Town, North Bridge, Picardy Place, 
Princes Street, Queen Street, Rutland Street, York Place. ) 



INDEX. 243 

Education of lower classes "Utopian" but necessary, 33; of 
sculptor by naturalism, 48 ; of Turner in art, 95 ; of medi- 
sevals and moderns compared, 118 ; of Pre-Raphaelites, 

Egypt, 79 ; Egyptian decoration naturalistic, 71 ; conventional 
and yet true, 84. Egyptian battles not painted by Greeks, 
129. 

Elgin marbles, 130. 

English architecture, spirit of, 22 n (and see Architecture, 
pseudo-Greek and Gothic). 

Engraving, difficult and unhealthy, 47. 

Ephesus, 114. 

Etty, W., 129. 

Execution (artistic) in mediaeval and modern art, 127 ; a mis- 
taken aim, 128 ; in sculpture, 40. 

Ezzelin, tyrant of Padua, 112. 

FAgADE of Abbeville, Amiens, Bayeux, Lyons, Paris (Notre 
Dame), Rheims, Verona (Duomo and San Zeno), 67. 

Fielding's novels, 90. 

Finish in painting and sculpture, 40. 

Firth of Forth, 1. 

Flaxman, sculptor and designer, 129. 

Florence : energy of the mediaeval republic, Preface ; Giotto's 
campanile, Preface; inlaid architecture, 53; Ponte della 
Trinita, 58; Borgo Allegro, "Joyful Quarter" of Sta. 
Maria Novella, said to be so called from the reception of 
Cimabue's Madonna, 74. 

Foreground of Giotto and Orcagna, 85 ; of fifteenth century, 86 ; 
of Titian and Correggio, 87 ; of Titian and Leonardo, 99. 

Francis, St., painted by Giotto, 122. 

F?-aser s Magazine, friendly criticism of " Stones of Venice," 76 n. 

French in twelfth and thirteenth centuries the greatest nation, 21. 

Fribourg, open-work spire, 21. 

Friendship, romantic when real, 32. 

Frieze of Renaissance building criticised, 35. 

Gable, used over Palladian windows, 7 ; the best form for the 
roof, 17; its various artistic effects, 18; combines with 
pointed arch to form Gothic apse, porch, &c, 18; as roof 
to towers, gradually becomes the spire, 20, 21. Not a 



244 INDEX. 

heroic, but a homely feature, 21, 23 n. Suggestion for its 
use in a modern porch, 25. 

Garret window of Hotel de Bourgtheroude, 52 and fig. 19. 

Geneva, 90. 

Genius is not industry, but usually accompanies it, 96. 

Genoa serpentine, 53. 

George, St., church of, Southwark, 7. 

George Street, Edinburgh, 1 ; church in, 6. 

Geranium pratense (great crane's-bill), 41. 

Germany, street architecture, 18. 

Ghent, street architecture, 18. 

Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 83. 

Ghirlandajo, Domenico, his Life of the Virgin, 122. 

Gibeon, Solomon's vision at, 126. 

Giotto, as architect of Florence Cathedral and its campanile. 
Preface; universal talents, Preface, 61; as thinker, 83; as 
landscapist, 84 and fig. 20, 85, 86; supposed "a mere 
infant in his profession," 109; his St. Francis, 122 ; paint- 
ing at Avignon, 85 ; chosen at an early age to decorate 
Vatican, 141. 

Glasgow, Gothic buildings at, 19 and n. 

Gloire and devoir, 118. 

Gothic, see Architecture, Decoration. 

Government of Middle Ages confessed Christianity, 119. 

Greek, see Architecture, Art, Decoratio?u 

Grotesque, Gothic, 43. 

Hamilton, Dr. James, "The Lamp and the Lantern," 79. 

Handling as important in sculpture as in painting, 40. 

Hay don, Benjamin, on Turner, 102. 

Henry III., religious art under, 116. 

Highlands of Scotland : Ben Ledi and Ben More, 1 ; 

Trossachs, 22, 23 n. 
High Street, Edinburgh, 2. 
Historical painting, see Painting. 
Hogarth, William, 130. 
Holy rood, Edinburgh, 22, 67. 
Holy Island, 92. 
Homer, 78, 130. 

Horace, no landscape feeling in " Iter ad Brundusium," 7S, 
Horatii, 31. 
Huggins, Mr., of Liverpool, 71. 



INDEX. 245 

Hunt, W. Holman: his " Claudio and Isabella," 136, 138; his; 
age, 141 (see Pre-Raphaelites). 

Ideal mountains, 86 (see Imagination, Imitation). 
Imagination, of Orcagna, 123 ; of mediaevals, 124 ; of historical 

School, 129 ; of the Pre-Raphaelites, 139. 
Imitation of nature is not naturalism, 68; deceptive "scene 

painting " is bad, 88 ; not attempted by the mediaevals, 124. 

In architecture, imitation of previous models marks degra- 
dation of style, 55, 73. 
Inlaid coloured stone as decoration, 53. 
Iron, never likely to play important part in architecture, 28 ; 

danger of cast iron in construction, 7 ; wrought iron 

crests to roofs, 18. 
Isabella, Claudio and, by W, Holman Hunt, 136, 138. 
Isaiah "a master of poetry*" 126 (and see Bible). 
Israelites the only ancient people with feeling for landscape, 

and why, 79. 
Italian campaign of Napoleon III., 31. 

Jeremiah (see Bible). - / 

Jerome, St., picture by Titian, at Milan, 88 and fig. 23. 

Jerusalem, 80. 

Jewellery usually more ostentatious than artistic, 51. 

Job (see Bible). 

Johnson, Dr., little feeling for landscape, 90. 

Jordan, 79. 

Judea, 80. 

Jullien, Etudes a deux crayons, 128. 

Keats, 92. 

Kings, three, of Orcagna's Triumph of Death, and British 
Museum MS. , 123 and n. 

" Lamp and the Lantern, The," by Dr. James Hamilton, 79. 

Landscape, see Painting, Scenery. 

Landseer, Sir Edwin, 109, 130. 

Last Judgment, painted by Michael Angelo, 123. 

Law of nature is the condition of beauty, 12. 

Lawrence, Sir T. , 104. 



246 INDEX. 

Lazarus and Dives, painted on palace windows at Northampton, 

116, 117. 
Leaf, as type of natural form, 8, 9 ; as type of pointed arch, 14. 
Lebanon, 79. 

Leeds, proposed tower to Town Hall, Preface. 
Leo X., 75, 129. 

Leonardo da Vinci, 83, 86, 99, and fig. 22. 
Leonidas, 31, 112. 

Leslie, Charles, R.A., " Life of Turner," 97. 
Liberate Rolls, quoted in Hudson Turner's " History of Domestic 

Architecture," 116 n. 
Liber Veritatis of Claude and Liber Studiorum of Turner, 98. 
Lichfield Cathedral spire, 21. 
Lindsay, Lord, "Christian Art" quoted, Preface. 
Linlithgow Palace, 24. 
Lintel, characteristic of Greek architecture, 6 ; its weakness, 6, 

7 ; inferiority, 58. 
Lion, Greek, 42, 43 and frontispiece; Egyptian, 84. 
Lisieux, street architecture, 18. 
Lochleven Castle, 24, 92. 
Lombardic plain, churches, and towers, 20. 
Louis, St., 75, 112 ; Louis XIV. and XVI., 75. 
Loutherbourg's painting imitated by Turner, 97. 
Lucca, San Michele, 66. 
Lyons Cathedral, bracket, 37, figs. 13 and 15 ; facade, 67. 

Mall, the, 89. 

Manners, Lady Robert, painted by Lawrence, 104. 

Marathon, warriors at, depicted by Greeks,* 129. 

Margaret, St., 116. 

Mark's, St., Venice: general design, 66; campanile, 21 n\ 
mosaics, 22 n. 

Marochetti, Baron, his statue of Coeur de Lion, 13072. 

Mary, Virgin, 116; painted by Ghirlandajo, 122; by Leonardo, 86. 

Masaccio, innovator in landscape, 87. 

Maxwell of Polloc, window in house belonging to, 52 n. 

Mediaeval : Middle Age, character, no, in ; an age of faith, .112-.- 
115 ; shown in art, 116 ; in education, 118 ; and in govern- 
ment, 119. In its art truth was sought before execution 
and beauty, 127 ; its spirit illustrated, 128. Its " historical " 

* Referring probably to the Stele of Aristion, known as "The Soldier 
of Marathon." 



INDEX. 247 

painting was the record of contemporary events, 129. (See 

Architecture, Art, Painting.) 
Melrose Abbey, 24, 92. 
Michael Angelo one of the three greatest architects, 61 ; chief of 

the age of drawing, 83 ; borrowed from Orcagna, 123. 
Michele, San, church at Lucca, 66. 
Milan Cathedral, 67. 
Millais, Sir J. E., R.A., illustrations by, 42 and Frontispiece ; 

success at R.A. schools, 131; "Ophelia," 138; inventive 

powers, 139 ; age, 141. 
Miltiades, 129. 
Modern Age radically different from Middle Age, 109 ; in temper, 

no ; in absence of religious feeling, 112 -115 ; shown in art, 

116 ; in education, 118 ; in government, 119. In modern 

art execution and beauty are sought rather than truth, 127 ; 

its spirit illustrated, 128. 
Moliere, 90. 

Monte Viso (mediaeval Christians, Waldenses), 114. 
Morality and art, 122. 
Mosaics of St. Mark's, 22 n. 
Mound, the (Edinburgh), 41, 42. 
Mountains sacred to Israelites, and why, 79. 

Napoleon III. , Italian campaign, 31 ; an honest negotiator, 32. 

Nash, architectural subjects, 18. 

Nature abhors equality and monotony, 8 ; sunrises and flowers 
not monotonous, 3 ; is normally beautiful, 8 ; rarely perfect 
and rarely ugly, n, 12 ; perfectly beautiful when completely 
fulfilling some natural law, e.g. sapphire, 12. 

Safe to copy nature in sculpture, not in painting, 48 ; but 
all decoration should be based on nature, 68 ; the limits of 
conventionalism, 69-71 (see Decoration). 

Love for nature not pagan but Jewish and Christian, 78 - 
81 ; destroyed by the Renaissance, 89, 90 ; revived at the 
end of the eighteenth century, 91-94 (see Art). 

Nelson, Lord, 112. 

Netherlands, street architecture, 18. 

New town of Edinburgh, see Edinburgh. 

Nineteenth century characteristics, 23 ; architecture, 24 (see 
Modern). 

Norman architecture, 6. 

Normandy, street architecture, 18. 



248 INDEX. 

Northampton, 116. 

North Bridge, Edinburgh, 130. 

Oakham Castle, 4 n, 27. 

Olives, Mount, 80. 

Ophelia, picture by Millais, 138. 

Orcagna as landscapist, 84, 85 ; his dramatic power, 123. 

Ornament (see Decoration). 

Osbaldistone (Scott's " Rob Roy"), 22. 

Ostade, 138. 

Oxalis acetosella (wood sorrel), 39. 

Oxford Almanack, illustrated by Turner, 95. 

Paganism had no love of nature, 78, 88. 

Painters, bad, have evil influence, 48 ; the greatest named, 83 ; 
all truly great landscapists confess obligations to Turner, 
and why, 99 ; the greatest painted what they saw, 130. 

(See Angelico, Bellini, Benozzo, Bird, Bonifazio, Claude, 
Correggio, Cuyp, Diirer, Etty, Flaxman, Ghirlandajo, 
Giotto, Hay don, Hogarth, Hunt, Jullien, Lawrence, Leo- 
nardo, Leslie, Loutherbourg., Masaccio, Michael Angelo, 
Millais, Nash, Orcagna, Ostade, Perugino, Potter, Poussin, 
Prout, Raphael, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Rossetti, Salvator, 
Stanfield, Teniers, Tintoret, Titian, Turner, Vandevelde, 
Veronese, Wells, Wilkie, Wilson.) 

Painting (A) in general : difficult to judge, 48; how it differs 
from architecture, 49 ; it is desirable in complete archi- 
tecture, 61 ; in architecture any colouring may be called 
"painting," 65 n. It depends little on means and 
materials ; Reynolds and the ink-bottle, 84. 

The age of painting,— sixteenth century, 83 ; aim of 
mediaeval painting, 123 ; historical painting is properly 
contemporary record; the follies of the "Grand School," 
129, 130. Portraiture, 130. (See Pre-Raphaelites.) 
(B) Landscape: evolution of, 84; five periods, 94-100; the 
Giottesque advance, 85 ; the Leonardesque, 86 ; Masaccio, 
87 ; Titianesque, 88 ; Renaissance, its shortcomings, 88 ; 
Romanticist revival, 93; Turner, 95-106; the type of 
perfect landscape first given by Turner, 100. (See Cloud- 
painting, Foreground, Tree-pai?iting.) 

Palladian windows, 7. 

Pan, 118. 



INDEX. 249 

Papworth, Mr., in Journal of Archaeological Institute, 20 n. 

Paris, Notre Dame, facade, 67; modern Parisian decoration, 117. 

Parliament practically unchristian, 119. 

Parnassus painted by Raphael, 126. 

Parthenon, 24, 63. 

Pastoral poetry, 89, 90 ; landscape, 90, 91. 

Patriotism, grounds for, 1 ; healthy rivalry, 19 ; false when 

founded on vanity, 21. 
Patronage, its responsibilities, 45, 47, 48 ; safe rules for, 48 ; in 

architecture, 2; the best kind, "not buying, but being, 

pictures," 137. 
Pediment, 23, and n. 
Pentlands, 1. 
Pericles, 129. 
Perugino, Pietro, 86. 
Peterborough Cathedral porch, 18. 

Peter's, St., Glasgow, 19 n (St. Peter's at Rome alluded to, 75). 
Petrarch, 126. 
Phidias, 61, 130. 
Philanthropy, "Utopian" but obligatory, 33 (see Charity, 

Workman). 
Philosopher, German, "the last most ingenious and most 

venomous," * 32. 
Picardy, street architecture, 18. 
Picardy Place, Edinburgh, 3. 

Piety shown in decoration, not in construction, 22 n. 
Pindar, 126. 
Pinnacles, misplaced, 17 ; well placed, 18 ; on spire, 21 ; 

romantic, 22. 
Plato, landscape feeling, 78. 
Poetry of architecture, 23. 

painted by Raphael, 125. 

Polloc, Maxwell of, 52 n. 

Ponte della Trinita, Florence, 58. 

Porch, its romance, 23 ; proper construction and use, 25 ; chief 

point of decoration, 67. (See Abbeville, Amie?is, Bayeux, 

Rheims, Peterborough, Strasbourg, Verona.) 
Potter, Paul, 138. 
Poussin, Gaspar, 91, 97. 

* Schopenhauer had just been introduced to the British public (by 
John Oxenford in the IVestoiinster Review, April 1853), as the leader of 
a reaction against transcendental and theological philosophy. 



250 INDEX. 

Pre-Raphaelites : meaning of the name " Pre-Raphaelite breth- 
ren," 107; accurately correct, 125; their reactionary tend- 
ency, 109 ; not, however, to the ignorance, but to the 
sincerity of the Middle Ages, 131. Turner "the first and 
greatest Pre-Raphaelite," 134; their first principle to draw 
everything from Nature, 42, 131 ; their studies and struggles, 
131 ; their youth, 141 ; hardness but accuracy of their draw- 
ing, 131 ; some of them more severely realistic than others, 
132 n ; they refuse popular ideas of beauty, 133 ; do not 
appreciate other styles than their own, 135 ; cannot paint 
distant landscape, 134 ; are highly imaginative, 136, 138. 
Forecast of their ultimate triumph, 133, 136, 139. (See 
Hunt, Millais, Rosselti.) 

Preservation of ancient buildings advocated, 74 n. 

Princes Street (Edinburgh), 2. 

Proportion the basis of all life and art, but not sufficient alone 
to make architecture artistic, 63. 

Protestants, 115, 117. 

Prout, Samuel, 18, and ?i, 93 and fig. 8. 

Pugin, A. W. , architect, 64 n. 

Queen Street, Edinburgh, 3 ;— Hall, 3. 

Quixotism, 32, 33. 

Quotations and allusions in these lectures, see Azithor (" Stones 
of Venice") Bible, British Museum (MS. Arundel, 83), 
Builder, Carlyle, Dante, Eraser's Magazine, Hamilton, 
Hay don, Homer, Huggins, Leslie, Liberate Rolls, Lindsay, 
Papworth, Scott, Times, Turner {Hudson), Young (•' Night 
Thoughts "), Young (" Art," &c. ) 

Radcliffe, Mrs., landscape feeling, 92, 93. 

Raphael, chief of the age of drawing, 83, 86 ; marks the turning 
point from medievalism to modernism, 107, 109, 115 ; in 
his Vatican frescoes of Poetry and Theology, 125, 126, 141. 
Portrait of, 129. As portraitist, 130. 

Reformation, 115. 

Rembrandt, 97. 

Religious feeling, how shown in architecture, 22 n ; in land- 
scape, 79; in mediaeval art, 116; absent in modernism, 
112-122. 

Renaissance : evil influence on the workman and public, 74, 75 ; 
destroyed Gothic monuments, 74 ; characteristic features 



INDEX. 251 

shown in Versailles, 75 ; it neglected, feared or misunder- 
stood landscape scenery, 90. (See Architecture, Art, 
Modern Age, Painting. ) 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 84, 130. 

Rheims, cathedral, 18 ; facade, 67. 

Rhone, mediaeval Christians of the — (Albigenses), 114. 

Richard Cceur de Lion, statue by Marochetti, 130 n. 

Richmond Bridge, 90. 

Robespierre, 112. 

Robson, G. F., 93. 

Roman, Romanesque, see Architecture. 

Romantic : meaning of the word, it does not imply falsehood, 
29 ; nor folly, 30 ; but delight in unusual beauty, sublimity, 
or virtue, 31 ; reality the true romance (Carlyle), 140; and 
the feeling more valuable than conscience even, but was 
made impossible for a time by Cervantes, 32. (And see 
Quixotism, Utopian). Gothic architecture is romantic in 
a good sense, 22, 24 ; though not so in the sense of being 
unattainable, 34. 

Rome, see Cloaca, Vatican, Colosseum. (St. Peter's alluded 

to, 75-) 
Roof is the " soul" of the cottage, 16, and the most important 

part of North European architecture ; its best form is a 

steep gable, 17 ; should be built of stone or wood, 18. 

Gothic vaulting springs like stalks of ash leaves, 8. Roof 

of tower develops into Gothic spire, 20. (See Gable, 

Vault.) 
Rose, decorative treatment, 37. 
Roslin Chapel, 24. 

Rossetti, D. G., his imagination, 139; age, 141. 
Rouen, street architecture, 18 ; cathedral, 18 ; tower, 22, fig. 

12 ; transepts, 67 ; " Butter-tower," 22 n ; Hotel de Bourg- 

theroude, 52 and fig. 19. 
Rousseau, J. J., 92, 93. 
Ruskin, John, see Author. 
Rutland Street, Edinburgh, 34. 

Salisbury Cathedral, spire, 21. 

Salvator Rosa, 88, 91, 122. 

Sancho Panza, 78. 

Sand, George, 93. 

Sandwich Islander not "romantic," 31. 



2$2 INDEX. 

Sapphire, why beautiful, 12. 

Sash to Gothic windows, 27. 

Saxon, see Architecture, 

Scaffolding, fall at Crystal Palace, 7 ; much modern building is 
merely scaffolding, 7. 

Scaligeri of Verona, 75 n. (See Can Grande.) 

Scenery, not loved by ancient pagans, 78 ; but associated by 
Jews with Divine power and finely described, 79 ; sympa- 
thetic to spirit of Christianity, 81 ; neglected or misunder- 
stood in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 90 ; admired 
in nineteenth century, 92 ; by the Romanticists, i.e.., reaction 
to Christian spirit if not Christian creed, 93. (See Nature, 
Painting. ) 

Scotland, natural facilities for inlaid-stone decoration, 53 ; good 
taste of inhabitants dormant, 24 ; good old architecture, 52 
and n ; religious feeling, 44 ; independent spirit, 54. (See 
Border, Borthwick, Craigmillar, C?'ichtoun, Dunblane, 
Edinburgh, Firth of Forth, Glasgow, Highlands, Linlith- 
gow, Lochleven, Melrose, Pentlands, Polloc, Roslin.) 

Scott, Sir Walter, as principal landscapist in literature, 92 ; 
"Lady of the Lake" quoted — "Each purple peak," &c, 
22 and n ; " Rob Roy" quoted — "The old clock," &c, 
22 ; allusions to ' ' Lady of the Lake, " ' ' Lay of the Last 
Minstrel," "Marmion," " Guy Mannering, " "Antiquary," 
"Monastery," "Abbot," 92. 

Sculptors, see Chantrey, Flaxman, Ghiberti, Marochetti, 
Michael Angelo, Phidias, Steele. 

Sculpture, most important part of ancient Greek architecture, 
63 ; degraded in Renaissance style, 43 ; a school of sculp- 
ture is necessary to architecture, 61 ; should be naturalistic, 
48, but conventionalised, 68-71 ; and boldly handled, 40 ; 
is easier than painting, and educational, 48. Elgin marbles, 
130 ; statues by Steele and Marochetti, 130. 

Seine, river, 75. 

Shakspeare, 101. 

Shelley, 92, 93. 

Shingles as ornament, 18. 

Shipbuilding an art, but not a fine art, 60. 

Silenus, 118. 

Sill, see Window. 

Simplicity of square window, 3 ; of Coutances tower, 21 ; of 
construction not necessarily desirable, 58. 



INDEX. 



253 



Smollett, little love for nature, 90. 

Solomon, his natural history, 80 ; guards of his bed (Canticles 
iii. 7), 116 ; temple, 71. 

Southampton, 116. 

South wark, St. George's Church, 7. 

Spire, developed from tower by gable roof, 20, 21 ; mistake to 
throw into tracery altogether as if merely ornamental, 21. 
Domestic, 18. 

"Aspiration" theory criticised, 19 ; does not express re- 
ligious feelings so far as it is part of necessary construction, 
22 n\ expresses cheerfulness, 22; "romantic" associa- 
tions, 22 ; used by Scott, 23. 

Stanfield, Clarkson, 93. 

Steele, Mr., statue of Duke of Wellington, 130. 

Sterne's " Sentimental Journey," 90. 

Stone, coloured, used for inlaid decoration, 53. 

Stonehenge, 7, 58. 

Strasbourg Cathedral porch, 18. 

Street architecture, see Architecture. 

Stylobate, 23. 

Sue, Eugene, 93. 

Switzerland, gabled towers, 20. 

Sydenham, 7. 

Symbolic use of mythology in Christian art, 126. 

TASTE of most men right, but dormant, 4 ; not to be referred to 
authority, but to nature and reason, 54. 

Teazle painted by Orcagna, 85. 

Teniers, David, 138. 

Tennyson, his landscape feeling, 92. 

Ten thousand Greeks, retreat, 31. 

Theology painted by Raphael in the Vatican, 125. 

Thompson, Thurston, reduced and transferred to wood the 
illustrations to this volume, Preface. 

Thought, the age of, thirteenth century, 83 ; necessary in decora- 
tion, 72. 

Tiber, 75. 

Tiberius, 31, 112. 

Tiger's head drawn by Millais, 42 and frontispiece* 

Times newspaper, April 21, 1854, quoted 130 n. 

Tintoret as landscapist, 83, 87, 88; not understood by Pre- 
Raphaelites, 135, but would have appreciated them, 139. 



254 INDEX. 

Titian as landscapist, 83, 86, 87, 99, and fig. 23 ; his Venus and 
Adonis, 122 ; St. Jerome, 88 and fig. 23. 

Tower: the motives of tower-building not religious, 19; ro- 
mantic associations, 22 ; development of spire from gabled 
tower, 20, 21. Fall of the tower of Beauvais, 19; Gothic 
towers at Glasgow, 19 n ; Italian fortress and bell-towers, 
20, figs. 9, 10; Border towers, '22. Tower of London, 
116 n. 

Travelling influences the feeling for landscape, 90. 

Tree- painting from Giotto to Titian, 84-88. 

Triumph of Death, fresco attributed to Orcagna in Campo 
Santo, Pisa, 85, 123. 

Truth, the aim of mediaeval art, not of modern (i.e., before the 
time of the Pre-Raphaelites), 123-128 ; love of, excessive in 
Pre-Raphaelites, but no good art without it, 139 ; Carlyle 
on, 140. 

Tulip-tree, exceptional form, 12 11. 

Turner, Hudson, "Domestic Architecture of En gland," 4 n, 116 n. 

Turner, J. M. W. , early life, 95 ; genius and industry, 96 ; did 
not copy, but emulated the old masters, 97; produced 
Liber Studiorum in rivalry with Claude, 98 ; universal 
achievements and influence, 99 ; first fixed the type of 
perfect landscape, 100 ; his position in history, 101 ; anec- 
dotes of his charity and justice, 102 ; unselfishness, 103 ; 
self-sacrifice, 104 ; generosity, 105 ; his isolation and death, 
106. Called the ' ' first and greatest of the Pre-Raphael- 
ites," 134. Illustrations from his works shown at the de- 
livery of these lectures, not reproduced in the book, Preface, 
98 n. 

Turret, 18, 22. 

Ugliness rare in nature, 11 ; implies violation of normal 

conditions, 12. 
Ulysses, 78. 

Universality of talents shown by the best architects, Preface, 61. 
Utopian, 29 ; "the devil's pet word," 33 ; hopes for improvement 

of architecture not Utopian, 34. 

Vagrants, 25. 
Vandevelde, 97. 

Variety necessary to beauty, 3 ; exemplified in nature, 8 ; in 
art, 14. 



INDEX. 255 

Vatican, frescoes of Giotto, 141 ; of Raphael, 125, 126. 

Vault, romantic associations, 23; Gothic vault resembles the 

spring of ash-stems, 8. 
Venice, spirit of her architects, 22 n ; ducal palace, 67 ; St. 

Mark's, 21 n, 22 n, 66. (See Bellini, Bonifazio, Tintoret, 

Titian, Veronese.) 
Venus and Adonis, picture by Titian, 122. 
Verona, described, 1 ; porches of the Duomo and San Zeno, 67 ; 

tombs of the Scaligeri, 75 n ; Veronese citizen imprisoned at 

Florence for criticising the campanile, Preface. 
Veronese, Paul, one of the four greatest painters, 83 ; would 

have appreciated Pre-Raphaelite work, 139. 
Verulam (Lord Bacon), 101. 
Vicar of Wakefield, 90. 

Vierge aux Rochers, picture by Leonardo, 86 and fig. 22. 
Virgil, landscape feeling, 78. 
Virgin Mary, see Mary. 
Voltaire, 32. 
Vulgate, MS. in Edinburgh Library, 122. 

Wallscourt, Lady, portrait by Sir T. Lawrence, 104. 

Walton's " Angler," 90. 

Water-colour drawing, "boldness," 40 ; healthy employment, 47. 

Wellington, Duke of, statue, 130. 

Wells Cathedral, 67. 

Wells, Mr., drawing-master, 105. 

Westminster Hall, 130 n. 

Whalley Abbey, 95. 

Wilkie, Sir David, 109, 129. 

William de Bourgtheroude, hotel of, 52. 

Wilson, Richard, 97. 

Wiltshire, sheriff of (temp. Henry III.), 116. 

Window, common square-headed, 3 and fig. 1 ; mediaeval type, 
4 and fig. 2 ; brick lintel, 6 and fig. 3 ; why the head should 
be a pointed arch, 13 ; but not the sill, except in traceries, 
etc., 14; circular or wheel, 15; bow, how to build, 26; 
pointed, how to fit with sashes, 27 ; painted, 116. 

Wooden architecture, characteristics, 18. 

Wordsworth, 92, 93. 

Workman, degraded by Renaissance architecture 38, 74; was 
an artist in Gothic times, 74; should be trained to intel- 
ligent naturalism, 43 ; is strictly controlled by patronage, 



256 INDEX. 

46, 47 ; should be left free in details, 55 ; must be freed and 
elevated, 76. 

York Place, Edinburgh, 3. 

Young, Rev. Edward, "Night Thoughts," Night viii., lines 

281-2 quoted, 32. 
Young, Rev. Edward, "Art, its Constitution and Capacities," 

141 n. 

Zeno, San, church at Verona, 67. 

Zion, 126. 

Zoological collection at Edinburgh, 42. 



THE END. 



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